Description:

Enrique Alférez
Mexican/Louisiana, 1901-1999
"The Source"
cast stone with applied patina
c. 1930, unsigned, study for The Shriever Fountain in the Botanical Garden, City Park, New Orleans.

The talented and beloved Mexican-born Enrique Alferez had a colorful and varied career before settling in New Orleans in 1929. Alferez worked in Texas before making his way to Chicago to study art under the revered sculptor and educator Lorado Taft (1860-1936) at the prestigious Art Institute of Chicago. Taft had personally invited the young Alferez to Chicago after seeing his work during a lecture tour of the South. Admired for his elegant, stylized figural sculptures, Alferez's work is found throughout his adoptive New Orleans, most especially in the Botanical Garden of City Park. Alferez, then involved with the Works Progress Administration as its New Orleans director along with the architect Richard Koch and the landscape artist William Wierdorn, was instrumental in the designing, planning and eventual construction of City Park, which soon became one of the artistic highlights of the city. The work offered here is an early model for one of the first sculptures commissioned for the Garden - the female figure at the center of the Shriever Fountain dating to 1932. An ode to the human figure, Alferez's sculptures simultaneously convey a sense of dignity while suggesting an undercurrent of intense emotion. There is a vitality and urgency to his work that reflects the soul of New Orleans.

  • Dimensions: 59 1/2 x 15 1/2 x 16 in. (151.1 x 39.4 x 40.6 cm.)
  • Medium: cast stone with applied patina
  • Condition: No signs of past restoration; scattered flaking and scratches to top layer of media throughout; surface inconsistencies and irregularities, likely hand of the artist and consistent with media and age; surface dirt.

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April 4, 2025 11:00 AM CDT
New Orleans, LA, US

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