Girl with a jug

Initially, this place was a spring, which served as the beginning of the stream Vangazya . Under Catherine II , a stone staircase was built to the spring, and over the stream and the wooden chute through which it flowed, an arch was built on the columns. In 1808 - 1810, the territory between the Big Pond and the Granite Terrace was turned into ledges, paths were laid, and the mouth of the side canal was turned into a fountain (project of engineer A. A. Betancourt). The fountain was launched in 1810 by the centenary of Tsarskoye Selo. The statue was created by the sculptor P. P. Sokolov. It was originally alabaster . There were flaws of the fountain. On June 16, 1816, engineer F. Canobbio sent a letter to the Palace Board: "The newly built cascade with an alabaster figure in the upper Tsarskoye Selo garden has now been translated into perfect order and completely finished" ^[2] .

The bronze figure of “Thrush” (“Tsarskoye Selo statue”) appeared in the second half of 1816 (according to other sources, in 1817 ^[3] ). She was cast in bronze at the Academy of Arts (the casting cost 3,000 rubles). The author's gypsum model of the statue is kept in the State Russian Museum ^{[4] [5]} .

The source of the plot was La Fontaine 's fable "The Milkmaid, or the Jug with Milk" ^[2] . The story of the fable - thrush Peretta hurries to the market, planning on buying the money to buy chickens, and then, having sold them, to breed piglets. After that, selling piglets, buy calves. At this moment she breaks a jug with milk. Sitting down next to a broken pitcher, Peretta regrets his unfulfilled dreams and tries to invent explanations of what happened for her husband ^[6] .

The statue resembled the face and figure of Alexander I's spouse - Elizabeth Alekseevna , but during the Alexander's rule this was not emphasized because of the complicated relationship between the sovereign and his wife ^[7] . In memory of the daughter of the Empress, who died, the Italian sculptor Paolo Triskorni created a sculptural composition for Elizabeth Alexeyevna - a grieving young woman sits with her head on her hand. According to some art critics, this image was put by Betancourt as the basis for the design of the fountain ^[8] . Another subject of the empress’s grief was the death from tuberculosis of her lover, the twenty-seven-year-old cavalier Alexei Okhotnikov , and according to other sources his murder during his return from a performance in the Hermitage Theater in January 1807 ^[2] .

Garden master Johann Bush created a romantic landscape around the fountain ^[2] .

For a long time, the palace and park administration did not know exactly where the water flows into the fountain. In 1877, the jet from the jug suddenly began to disappear, it was discovered that there were no drawings of the power supply system. Special research work was entrusted to engineer Chernyavsky. He managed to find out and fix on the drawings the water supply system, arranged by Betancourt. The system was recognized as rational and required only minor renovations ^[9] .

At the end of the 19th century , a fence in the shape of an iron picket fence appeared around the fountain. The fence was surrounded by low greenery. In 1937, the fence was eliminated ^[2] .

Before the German occupation, the statue was buried, so it did not suffer, but the broken vessel was lost. During the Great Patriotic War, the city’s water supply system was destroyed, and the fountain became the only source of drinking water for residents of Tsarskoye Selo and its environs ^[10] . In 1945, the sculpture was returned to its place; in 1951, a broken jug was re-created, from which water poured again ^[11] . Currently, the original statue is in the museum’s funds, and there is a copy in the park, which was made in 1990 ^[12] .

A copy of this sculpture was presented by the spouse of Emperor Nicholas I , Alexandra Feodorovna , to her brother, the Prince of Prussia, Friedrich Karl Alexander . It was installed in the Gliniksky Palace near Potsdam . This sculpture disappeared during World War II. Currently, a copy made in the USSR is also installed instead. The author's bronze copy of the sculpture stands in the estate Sukhanovo ^{[2] [13]} .

In June 1992, in Columbus , USA , the original was shown at the AmeriFlora-92 exhibition timed to the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America by Columbus . For this, a special reservoir was dug, on the bank of which a large stone was installed. From above, they fixed a statue with a jug and brought in water ^[2] .

The slender proportions of the body and the antique face of the girl reflected the ideas of the era of classicism about perfect beauty. The girl is dressed in an antique chiton , and not in the dress of a French peasant woman, as in La Fontaine. Roughly treated pedestal underlines the fragility of the girl. At her feet lies a broken jug, a stream of water runs out of it, leading off into the groove that communicates with the fountain. Originally it was a swimming pool, decorated in the form of a grotto , to which a staircase made of Pudost stone led. The grotto was liquidated in the middle of the 19th century ^[2] .

In the funds of Tsarskoe Selo there is a copy of this sculpture, created in case of vandalism.

In poetry

• Also, the monument is mentioned in the poems of Vsevolod Rozhdestvensky, “Our domed temple is covered with a heavy dome” (1920), Tatiana Gnedich “The Green Park roars without fading” (1958), Anna Shidlovskaya “The Tsarskoye Selo statue” ^[21] .

In music

• Cui C. Tsarskoye Selo statue (romance) to poems by A. S. Pushkin. Cit. 57, No. 17. 1900 ^{[22] [23]} .

In painting

In the XIX century, there was a legend that the water from the fountain cures bodily and heart ailments. It was widely distributed and even aroused the interest of specialists. A chemical analysis conducted in 1910 showed that the quality of the water from the fountain is inferior to tap water in Tsarskoye Selo, coming from the Oryol and Taitsky keys ^[10] .

• Semenov V.P. Girl with a jug. The history of the famous fountain .. - SPb. : Genio Loci, 2010. - 32 p. - ISBN 978-5-903903-03-1 .