Ross Fountain: A Parisian Jewel Beneath the Castle

The Edinburgh Collection

The Edinburgh Collection explores Scotland's capital not as a postcard, but as a city built in layers of stone, story, and weather. These works begin on the volcanic crown of the castle and descend the long ridge of the Royal Mile, past the crown steeple of St Giles', beneath the monuments of Calton Hill, and through the old memory of Greyfriars Kirkyard. They follow the Water of Leith into the mill-shadowed quiet of Dean Village, pause at the gilded ironwork of the Ross Fountain in Princes Street Gardens, and curve along the colorful arc of Victoria Street. The collection seeks the moments when mist, lamplight, and ancient masonry align to reveal something beyond record: not simply what these places look like, but what they have come to mean to the queens, reformers, poets, and ordinary citizens who climbed these streets before us. This is a tribute to Dùn Èideann, the fort on the rock: a deeply gothic city where the past stands exposed and cobbled lanes lead the way back in time.

Ross Fountain: A Parisian Jewel Beneath the Castle

Two mermaids tip golden urns while a gilded lion’s head sends its own stream into a scalloped shell below. This is the Ross Fountain at close range, French cast iron in turquoise and antique gold with figures of bronze-brown, standing in the valley beneath Edinburgh Castle where the Nor’ Loch once lay. It was cast at Sommevoire in the Haute-Marne, arrived in Edinburgh in 122 pieces, and was given to the city by a gunsmith who never saw it assembled. A dean was stirred to fury by its bare-shouldered figures, years of argument went into settling its site, and its 2017 restoration revealed an iron frame held together by rust. In this capture, drawn close enough to follow the curl of every tress and the ribbing of every shell, the fountain does what it has done since 1872: it turns a garden path into a place to linger.

A Gunsmith Falls for a Fountain

In 1862, London opened its International Exhibition, a vast showcase of art, industry, and invention, and among the wonders on display stood a fountain of cast iron sent from France by the ironmaster Antoine Durenne. One visitor, an elderly Edinburgh gunsmith named Daniel Ross, was captivated. Ross was known as much for his love of art and natural science as for his trade, and the fountain claimed his admiration at once.

His obituary sketches a vivid character: strong in his likes and dislikes, conservative in politics, and open-handed toward friends and causes he approved. Ross was also a collector, and his private museum held a fine array of minerals and geological specimens. According to the notice, his wish to adorn Edinburgh grew from gratitude for the encouragement his business had received over the years.

The idea of a fountain for Princes Street Gardens had first been floated in 1859, when the gardens still belonged to the proprietors of Princes Street. In 1864, a letter reached the Town Council: a private gentleman would contribute £2,000 toward a fountain, with the rest of an estimated £4,000 to be raised from the citizens. The gentleman soon proved to be Ross. He had set in motion a gift that he would not live to see completed.

Iron Cast Like Bronze

Antoine Durenne (1822 to 1895) was an ironmaster with an artist’s education. Having studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he purchased a small foundry at Sommevoire, in the Haute-Marne, and built it into a firm whose statues, fountains, benches, and street lamps were shipped around the world. His wager was that cast iron, properly modeled and finished, could rival bronze at a fraction of the cost. The fountain Ross admired in London was that wager made visible, and it was hailed for its design and modeling.

The figures came from the studio of Jean-Baptiste Jules Klagmann (1810 to 1867), a Paris-born sculptor who had trained at the École des Beaux-Arts and whose work graced the Louvre and the fountains of the French capital. He did not see Edinburgh’s version rise. Klagmann died in 1867, two years before the fountain’s pieces were shipped to Leith.

What Ross ordered was a larger version of the exhibition fountain, with the horses and nymphs of the outer basin omitted to keep the cost in check. What remained is a tiered composition in the Beaux-Arts spirit. Lions’ heads serve as spouts. Mermaids pour from flowing urns above scalloped shell basins. Higher up, four seated women represent Science, Art, Poetry, and Industry, each carrying the emblems of her calling, among them a lyre, a globe, and a palette and brush, while a standing woman above them holds a cornucopia. The curved base is Craigleith sandstone, quarried in Edinburgh itself, which sets a French fantasy on a Scottish footing.

A Gift in Search of a Garden

Finding the fountain a home proved harder than finding the fountain. Suggestions came and went over the years: a spot beside the Scott Monument, which proved too small; the lower gardens at the east end of Princes Street, which Ross refused; a position outside the new Caledonian Station at the West End; even Charlotte Square, George Street, and Lothian Road. Ross himself had asked for the upper path opposite Castle Street.

Patience wore thin. Ross grew so frustrated that he once offered to forfeit the more than £1,000 he had already paid and walk away, and the correspondence of the time shows how tense relations with the council had become. A settlement came in June 1868, when the owners of West Princes Street Gardens, which remained in private hands until 1876, approved the present site beneath the castle rock.

In September 1869 the fountain arrived at Leith in 122 pieces and was carried the three miles by road to the gardens. A year later it still stood unassembled, and the council added £200 so that it might be finished before the winter of 1870. Work continued into the summer of 1871. By then Ross was gone. He died in January of that year, and the fountain was completed in 1872, a gift that outlived its giver.

The Dean and the Mermaids

Not everyone welcomed the arrival. Edward Ramsay, minister of St John’s Episcopal Church on Princes Street and Dean of Edinburgh, was a well-loved figure in the city and the author of Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character, which reached its twenty-second edition by the time of his death. He objected strongly to the fountain’s bare-shouldered figures, branding them “grossly indecent and disgusting” and an offense to the moral feelings of the community.

Accounts of the period link his protests to delays in setting the fountain up, and he was not alone. One objector lamented the sight of such an unseemly and nonsensical erection beneath the castle rock. The chosen site, tucked below the rock rather than on a grand thoroughfare, appears to have been a hard-won compromise.

Peace came with a cheerful bargain: the water would flow on Sundays and whenever the band played. In time the grumbling faded, and the figures became simply part of the garden.

Dean Ramsay died on 27 December 1872, the very year the fountain stood complete. A Celtic cross raised in his memory still rises in the grounds of St John’s, a short walk from the fountain, so that the critic and his subject remain neighbors on the edge of the same garden. The mermaids, for their part, have outlasted every objection.

Where the Nor’ Loch Once Lay

The valley beneath the castle has had many lives. It was once the Nor’ Loch, a medieval stretch of water that formed part of the city’s defenses and made expansion northward difficult. As the Georgian New Town rose from the 1760s, the loch was drained and the valley became a garden. The West Gardens were laid out in the 1820s for the proprietors of Princes Street and the subscribers of the New Town. The fountain, installed in 1872, spent its first years in private grounds; its public life began in 1876, when the town council reacquired the ground and opened it as a park laid out by the City Architect, Robert Morham.

When the fountain’s new foundations were dug in 2017, archaeologists watched the groundworks and took environmental samples that may one day tell more about the Nor’ Loch itself. The fountain stands in the very valley the loch once filled, and water has found its way back to the place.

Few views in Edinburgh have been photographed as often as this one: ironwork and water in the foreground, the castle poised high above. The fountain has long supplied the foreground for postcards and travelers’ snapshots, and a Category A listing since 1970 recognizes its place in Scotland’s heritage. Even its neighbor tells a story, since the Ross Bandstand nearby takes its name not from the gunsmith at all, but from a distillery chairman, an unrelated Ross.

Reborn in Verdigris and Gold

A fountain of iron, water, and weather cannot rest forever. A restoration in 2001, carried out with East of Scotland Water, introduced efficient water recycling and let the fountain run again for the first time in almost five years. The respite was brief. By 2010 the water had fallen silent once more, and fears for the structure’s stability grew.

The rescue began in July 2017, when the Ross Development Trust, founded by Apex Hotels’ Norman Springford, and Edinburgh World Heritage set the restoration in motion. Once the fountain was taken apart, its true condition came to light: it had been all but held together by rust. Many castings had snapped, and each broken piece needed its own mold and a fresh casting, cleaned and painted before it could return. Back in the gardens, new foundations, a new internal support structure, and an underground water tank prepared the site. The final bill reached £1.9 million.

No one knew what color the fountain had worn when it arrived in 1872, and research turned up no firm clues. The team chose a finish called verdigris bronze, a blue-green with gold and copper-brown, in the spirit of the nineteenth-century fountains of the Place de la Concorde in Paris. It replaced the all-gold coat of recent decades and won approval from readers of a local newspaper, where 72 percent voted in favor. The gold details pay homage to the color the fountain had taken on, and the brown on the figures suggests freshly patinated metal.

On 8 July 2018, the broadcaster Grant Stott led a countdown, volunteers turned a giant tap, and water poured from the fountain for the first time since 2010. Children climbed in to cool off, reviving an old Edinburgh tradition. Lord Provost Frank Ross called it a historic day, and Emmanuel Cocher of the French Consulate observed that what had once been judged beyond repair was whole again. That autumn a new lighting scheme arrived, so that the fountain now glows after dark as well.

Technical Considerations

A 90mm portrait lens was chosen for this photograph, to give the mermaids their proper moment of timeless beauty. Photographing the Ross Fountain asks a camera to hold two opposing temperaments at once. The cast iron is cool, a verdigris-bronze teal that sinks into shade, while the gilded details above it catch every available ray and return it. A close view compounds the challenge, because the subject is nearly all texture: scalloped shells, scrolling ironwork, and figures modeled so that every surface meets the light differently. All of it had to resolve with equal conviction in a single frame.

The solution followed the methodology established across the House’s work. Subject masking, paired with detail and texture enhancement, recovered the shaded recesses and gave the central figures an added layer of clarity, texture, and contrast. Close attention to the basins kept the gilding from burning out, so highlights hold their warmth and shadows retain their structure. Color correction and luminosity adjustments then reconciled the cool teal of the ironwork with the warm gold and the bronze-brown of the figures, so that each register holds its own character while the whole reads as one.

Retouching cleared the frame of a wide spread of small artifacts. The restoration of the preceding years had begun to show light wear, and that gentle weathering lent the ironwork a character worth keeping, so it was left in place. Successive passes of detail recovery, from the lion’s head to the ribbed edges of the shell, brought the finest passages to a clarity the eye can seldom gather in the garden itself. The final image holds both character and a polish distinctive to the House of Montague.

Hyperreal Expansionism

Hyperreal Expansionism is an artistic methodology and aesthetic movement pioneered by TC Montague, born from a singular conviction: that the camera sensor does not define the upper boundary of photographic fidelity. Where traditional fine art photography accepts the native output of the sensor as a finished surface, Hyperreal Expansionism treats the capture as a foundation — a point of departure from which a composition is progressively elevated to a level of sharpness, clarity, and textural richness that no single exposure could achieve on its own. The technique is entirely original to the House of Montague, developed through decades of work spanning fine art photography, High Dynamic Range panoramic photography, advanced digital composition, and large-format museum-grade print production.

The Philosophy of the Exceeded Surface

The House of Montague methodology represents a departure from conventional photographic practice in favor of monumental reconstruction. It is photographic realism pushed past its own limits — through precise layering, meticulous masking, labor-intensive stacking of detail, and a reconstruction process that honors the integrity of what the lens captured while transcending its boundaries through hyperreal fidelity. The process rejects the assumption that the capture is the ceiling. It asserts that the definitive image exists beyond what the lens alone can see, and that it is the artist's responsibility to reveal it.

The Alchemy of the Image

Each work begins with a high-resolution photographic capture, which is then expanded well beyond its native dimensions to meet the demands of the largest intended print. At this new scale, the composition is methodically deconstructed into sections. Key figures, objects, and structural elements are individually isolated — each treated as its own universe of detail — and enhanced to a fidelity that exceeds the resolution of the space they will reoccupy. These hyper-resolved elements are then painstakingly reintegrated into the whole, layer by layer, section by section, until the full composition achieves a uniformity of detail that surpasses what any single-pass process could produce. The master file, completed at the maximum print resolution, ensures that every smaller edition inherits the full depth of that accumulated craftsmanship. The process is painstaking, irreducible to automation, and singular to each piece.

The Collector's Experience

The resulting aesthetic is unmistakable: a density of detail that rewards sustained, close-range viewing, where every element in the composition carries a precision and presence that feels more resolved than the eye expects. This is not merely a photograph. It is realism elevated beyond its own threshold — an image whose fidelity deepens the longer one stands before it, revealing layers of clarity and textural richness that unfold over time rather than surrendering themselves at a glance.

A Presence Beyond the Frame

Some images are glanced at and some are lived beside. The Ross Fountain belongs to the second kind. It carries the particular grace of an object made for delight, a thing of no practical use that a city argued over at length and then decided it could not do without.

The casual viewer sees a fountain: gilded ironwork, a scalloped shell, figures pouring water. The collector who has read this far sees a different company. Daniel Ross, the gunsmith and mineral collector, who paid for a gift he would never see assembled. Jean-Baptiste Jules Klagmann, the sculptor who died two years before the first crate reached Leith. Antoine Durenne, who set out to prove that iron could rival bronze. A dean who preached against the fountain and a city that adopted it anyway. Four women of iron, Science, Art, Poetry, and Industry, with a fifth above them holding her cornucopia over the garden, standing for what a Victorian city hoped to become and standing there still. And the casters and conservators who made a mold for every broken piece so that the fountain could rise again.

Wherever this work is hung, whether in a parlour warmed by lamplight, a dining room, or a hallway that catches the afternoon, it brings the same gilded calm to the wall it occupies. It does not compete with a room. It gives the room a flowing heart.

To live with this work is to keep a gift in the house, a reminder that the things most worth keeping are often those given freely, argued over, and restored by people who refused to let them be lost. The collector becomes more than the owner of a luminous photograph. They join the fountain’s long company of givers and keepers.

For the Designer

The design study for this work imagines its proper room: the Parlour of Princes Street, a symmetrical, Victorian-minded parlour that gathers tea, tartan, and lamplight around the fountain’s turquoise and gilt, with color, material, accent, and light composed as a single gesture so the fountain becomes the room’s gilded heart.

The palette is sampled from the room itself, so the colors complement the fountain rather than copy it. Oatmeal Plaster (#cbc3b6, LRV 55) is the dominant surface, a luminous, milky ground that gives the turquoise a calm field to rest against. New Town Stone (#a19a85, LRV 32) echoes the pale city beyond the windows. Parlour Oak (#8a6a52, LRV 16) carries the warmth of the gilding into timber. And Bracken Velvet (#495547, LRV 8) is the darkest register, a shadowed cousin of the fountain’s verdigris that anchors the sofa and ties the room back to the work.

Furnish with the warmth of years of tea and conversation rather than the polish of a weekend. White hydrangeas in stoneware jugs, ferns on wrought-iron stands, tweed cushions, an ivory throw, and a porcelain teacup on the coffee table give the room its lived-in ease, while antique gold lamps and candlesticks repeat the fountain’s gilding and a thread of seafoam carries its turquoise indoors.

Light it by the hour. Hold the room at 2400K for candlelit evenings, 3400K for everyday balance, and 4900K for fresh morning daylight. Staying below 5400K keeps the gold glowing and the velvet deep, and the fountain’s seafoam and gilding hold their color through every hour of that range.

Composed this way, the room does not display the fountain so much as welcome it, a warm, symmetrical parlour where each day unfolds in the presence of gilded calm and easy grace.

For the Collector

This image holds the Ross Fountain close: gilded lion, scalloped shell, and bronze-brown figures pouring water, rendered in verdigris and gold at a fidelity that rewards standing near. Where a postcard offers the view, this photograph offers the ironwork itself, every scroll of the casting and every ridge of the shell.

What the photograph offers is more than a landmark. Hidden in its details are a Parisian foundry, a sculptor’s four allegories, a dean’s famous disapproval, a loch that once lay beneath the garden, and a restoration that began with a mold for every broken piece. It is a subject with real story behind it, and the kind of image that gives a guest something to ask about and a household something to tell.

For collectors who love France and its ironwork, whose travels once carried them through Princes Street Gardens, who cherish Victorian craft and the grace of the Beaux-Arts, or who simply want a landmark with generosity at its heart, this piece offers a wall that keeps the memory of the place. The fountain will keep its station beneath the castle regardless. The collector who brings it home joins the long line of those who looked at it and decided it was worth giving, defending, and restoring.