Seaweed Girl Fountain

Edwin F. Keene of the Stetson Hat Company approached the Association for Public Art (then known as Fairmount Park Art Association) in 1921 with the offer to donate this figure “completely mounted in the pool.” The Seaweed Girl Fountain was accepted by the Association and installed in 1922 in East Fairmount Park along Sedgley Drive. Earlier that year, the sculpture was loaned to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for its 117th Annual Exhibition, where it won the Widener Gold Medal and the Fellowship Prize.

In the early 1960s, the Association commissioned the artist to add to the fountain, and Fenton created two bronze groups of angel fish swimming through a coral reef. The fish were stolen in 1974, and the figure was later relocated to the Fairmount Park Horticulture Center. The sculpture is now inside the greenhouse, where it joins Margaret Foley’s Centennial Fountain.

Beatrice Fenton was born and raised in Philadelphia. With the encouragement of a good family friend, Thomas Eakins, she studied art at the School of Industrial Art (which eventually became the University of the Arts) and later the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She also taught at Moore College of Art & Design. Her principal works were fanciful fountains with realistic renderings of youths amongst plant forms. Her other well-known sculpture in Philadelphia is the Evelyn Taylor Price Memorial Sundial in Rittenhouse Square.

Content on this page was adapted from Public Art in Philadelphia by Penny Balkin Bach (Temple University Press, 1992). Bach was the longtime Executive Director of the Association for Public Art, working with the organization from 1980 to 2022.