On Ingalls Mall, at the center of campus, stands Sunday Morning in Deep Waters, a bronze fountain sculpture by Swedish artist Carl Milles.
The work shows Triton, a sea god from Greek mythology, blowing a conch while his sons climb over him. Father and sons are surrounded by a school of fish. For decades, the fountain has served as a piece of public art and the setting for a U-M student tradition.
The fountain was commissioned in 1940 by Charles Baird, U-M’s first athletic director, as a memorial to his friend Thomas McIntyre Cooley. Cooley was one of the founding faculty members of the Law School, where he also served as dean, and later became a justice of the Michigan Supreme Court.
Milles designed the sculpture while working as sculptor-in-residence at Cranbrook. During his career, he often drew on themes from Greek mythology. In the piece, Triton and his sons are cast in bronze with a green patina, mounted on granite, and set in a pool about 20 feet wide.
The fountain was formally dedicated on June 20, 1941, when Baird presented it to then-U-M President Alexander Ruthven. In an article that ran in the Ann Arbor News at the time of the dedication, the work was described as “light and humorous.” Students eventually gave the fountain its own nickname: “Ye Gods and Little Fishes.”
Sunday Morning in Deep Waters has also been part of a student ritual known as the fountain walk. Incoming freshmen were invited to wade through the fountain toward the Diag to symbolize the beginning of their time at the university. Graduating seniors then retraced the path in reverse, toward Rackham Graduate School.
While not every student takes part in the tradition today, it is still often mentioned on campus tours.
By the 2010s, decades of exposure had left the fountain in poor condition, so the university undertook a major restoration with engineering firm Simpson Gumpertz & Heger. The changes, completed in 2018, extended the fountain’s life while making it easier to care for in the future.
Walter Pinkus
I remember first seeing the fountain as a little kid in the later 1940’s. The old black and white photo does not convey an aspect that fascinated me at the time: the water spraying from the fountain was reddish-colored, which I have to presume was a defect to the Ann Arbor water supply at the time, long-since remedied. Years later, in Grad School myself, I recall commenting on that to an acquaintance who lived in Whitmore Lake, who said that, currently, fighting the accumulating reddish tinge that was accumulating on his bathroom’s tile was a continuing problem.