Diana Fountain, Bushy Park

The Diana Fountain in Bushy Park, in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, is a seventeenth-century statue ensemble and water feature in an eighteenth-century setting with a surrounding pool and mile long tree lined vistas which honors the Roman Goddess Diana. Originally created for Somerset House in the 1630s, and remodelled about 1690, the fountain has stood since 1713 in Bushy Park, and now forms a large traffic island in Chestnut Avenue.

It is the focal point of two major vistas designed by Sir Christopher Wren, including Chestnut Avenue which is the ceremonial landward approach to Hampton Court Palace. The traffic island is circular and contains a 400-foot (120 m) diameter pool surrounded by lawns, with the Diana statue on a tall base in the middle of the pool. The fountain was listed as Grade II in 1952, and in February 2011 reclassified as Grade I.

The bronze sculptures were originally commissioned by Charles I for Queen Henrietta Maria's garden at Somerset House in central London. The original design for the fountain was apparently by Inigo Jones, whose sketch drawing survives at Chatsworth House, showing figures recognisably the same as those in place today, but in a different arrangement and in a different stonework setting. The Somerset House base was lower, and the surrounding pool much smaller, enabling a much closer view of the figures than is possible today. The central figure is naked in the drawing, and parts of the design are closely copied from engravings of earlier fountains in Bologna and Augsburg.

The execution of the gilt statue which forms the pinnacle of the tableaux has been attributed to Hubert Le Sueur, and related to payments to him from the king. The other metal sculptures, which are still ungilded, have been attributed to his rival Francesco Fanelli, and also to Le Sueur; a mention by John Evelyn in 1662 gave the whole fountain to Fanelli, but most historians follow the Royal Parks in preferring the documented involvement of Le Sueur. Preparation of the site had begun in 1633–34, and Le Sueur was given what appears to be his final payment after completion in 1637; Nicholas Stone was also paid for work on the stone elements, which were in black marble. In the original arrangement, recorded in a drawing of perhaps the 1670s, the figures of the boys, now on the corners, were higher up, at a level between the central female figure above and the sea-monsters carrying women below, and the scallop shells were on the corners, level with the breasts of the four female figures, catching water spouting from the fish held by the boys.

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