Some objects contain an entire city. The Wallace Pot by Astier de Villatte is one of them: a slender, sculptural vessel modelled after the celebrated drinking fountains that have stood along Parisian streets and in the city’s gardens since the nineteenth century.

Rendered in Astier de Villatte’s luminous white ceramic, the familiar cast-iron monument becomes intimate and domestic. Its four female figures, architectural base, ornamental canopy, and finely modelled details remain instantly recognizable. Yet the change of scale and material gives the Wallace Fountain a new presence. It is part vase, part lidded pot, part portrait of Paris.

A Gift to Paris

The original Wallace fountains appeared after a difficult period in the life of the city. Following the Siege of Paris and the upheaval of the Paris Commune, access to clean drinking water had become both scarce and expensive. Sir Richard Wallace, a British philanthropist who spent much of his life in France, donated the first fifty public drinking fountains to Paris.

The first was installed on Boulevard de la Villette in 1872. Wallace commissioned the French sculptor Charles-Auguste Lebourg to turn a practical public necessity into a work of civic beauty. Cast in iron and painted the deep green associated with Parisian street furniture, the fountains soon became part of the visual language of the city.

A monument to generosity, made small enough to live at home.

The best-known model is supported by four caryatids. Each figure represents a virtue: Simplicity, Kindness, Sobriety, and Charity. Together they hold the domed canopy above the stream of drinking water. More than 150 years later, Wallace fountains still provide fresh water to Parisians and visitors, while remaining among the most beloved and distinctive objects in the Paris streetscape.

Paris, Reinterpreted by Astier de Villatte

Astier de Villatte has always understood that the identity of Paris lives not only in its grand monuments, but also in the objects encountered every day. A café cup, a shop sign, a garden chair, an architectural fragment, or a fountain at the corner of a square can hold as much memory as a famous façade.

The Wallace Pot belongs to this deeply Parisian way of seeing. Rather than making a literal souvenir, Astier de Villatte studies the fountain’s silhouette and sculptural vocabulary, then translates them through the hand of the ceramicist. The dark iron of the street fountain becomes radiant white. Monumental scale becomes a vessel that can stand on a table, mantel, or cabinet. Civic ornament becomes a personal object.

Every Wallace Pot is handmade in Paris and stamped with the Astier de Villatte monogram and the initials of the artisan who made it. Slight differences in surface, form, and glaze are natural records of the process. They give each piece its own character and ensure that this miniature monument never feels mechanically reproduced.

An Object with Two Lives

With its lid in place, the Wallace Pot reads as a complete architectural sculpture. Remove the lid and it becomes an elegant vessel for flowers or branches. At approximately 30.5 centimetres high, it has enough presence to stand alone, but it is equally compelling among books, ceramics, and collected objects.

This dual nature is central to its charm. The pot is useful without surrendering its imagination, decorative without becoming remote. It carries the history of a public fountain into the private rituals of a room, and turns an emblem of Paris into something that can be handled, arranged, and lived with.

For admirers of Astier de Villatte, it captures many of the qualities that make the Paris atelier singular: historical curiosity, wit, romance, visible craftsmanship, and a gift for finding poetry in the objects of daily life.