Fountain "Milkmaid"

The fountain "Milkmaid," known as the "Tsarskoye Selo statue" or "Girl with a Jug," holds a special place among the park sculptures of Tsarskoye Selo: it is the only sculpture specifically created for the Catherine Park.

From 1808 to 1810, by order of Emperor Alexander I, landscaping began on the site of the former Sledding Hill under the direction of gardener Bouch and architect Ruski. The slope between the newly constructed Granite Terrace and the Large Pond was designed as green terraces; new paths were laid from the terrace to the pond, and the mouth of a side canal—where in the 1770s the waters of a local spring, hidden under an embankment, were diverted—was decorated with a fountain built according to a design by engineer Betancourt. Even then, the idea arose to decorate this part of Catherine Park with sculptures, but the figure of the Milkmaid appeared here only in the summer of 1816.

The statue was created by the famous sculptor Sokolov based on the fable by La Fontaine "The Milkmaid, or The Jug of Milk" and cast in bronze at the workshop of the Imperial Academy of Arts. A granite rock serves as the pedestal for the bronze figure of the girl. From the broken jug lying at her feet flows a stream of spring water, which runs through a narrow channel into the Large Pond.

At the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, before German troops entered the town of Pushkin, the statue of the Milkmaid was buried in the ground; thanks to this, the fountain was not damaged. Today, the original bronze "Girl with a Jug" (the artist’s plaster model of which is kept in the State Russian Museum) is held in the museum-reserve’s collection, and a copy cast in 1990 is installed in the park.

Sources:

https://www.tzar.ru/objects/ekaterininskypark/landscape/girlwithajug

https://pushkin.spb.ru/encycl/parks/devushka-s-kuvshinom.html