Littlefield Fountain
fountain and sculpture in Austin, Texas
Littlefield Fountain (also known as the Littlefield Memorial Gateway) is a World War I memorial monument designed by Italian-born sculptor Pompeo Coppini on the main campus of the University of Texas at Austin in Austin, Texas, at the entrance to the university's South Mall. Completed in 1933, the monument is named after university regent and benefactor George W. Littlefield, whose donation paid for its design and construction.
History
In 1916 Major George W. Littlefield, a former regent of the University of Texas at Austin and major benefactor to its development, proposed the construction of a memorial arch over the university's southern entrance that would honor the Confederate dead from the Civil War. In 1919 Littlefield contacted San Antonio-based Italian-born sculptor Pompeo Coppini, requesting a design that would include images of notable figures from the history of Texas and the American South, and proposing to fund the project with a donation of $200,000 (equivalent to $4,000,000 in 2025).
Coppini developed a design featuring a 40-foot (12 m) blind arch framing statues of six Confederate figures behind a pool and fountains, but he warned Littlefield that the project would require a larger budget, even after Littlefield agreed to increase his donation to $250,000. On April 15, 1920, Coppini presented university officials with a new, cheaper design that eliminated the arch and expanded the fountain pool to hold a large allegorical sculpture. Coppini also persuaded Littlefield to dedicate the monument to the students and alumni who had died in the Great War (now known as World War I), arguing that a Confederate memorial would only prolong the lingering resentments from the Civil War.
Littlefield died in November 1920, and Coppini spent most of the next decade developing the sculptures that he intended for the memorial. The project was impeded by cost overruns and delays, including a labor strike by Coppini's bronze workers. The six human figures were completed in 1925 and temporarily displayed in the Texas State Capitol, and the central sculpture was completed in 1928.
The public source identifies “Littlefield Fountain” as fountain and sculpture in Austin, Texas. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Littlefield, Fountain and fountain.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6652941. Authority coordinates are 30.284, -97.740. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1933, 1916, 1919 and 2025.
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This entry incorporates text from “Littlefield Fountain” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.