So I've started, hound after hare, on another mysterious public statue.
I ran across her on a quiet Spring morning's research. I was looking over the files of public statues of Newport at the Historical Society, and found one, facing toward the old brickworks, from the famous courthouse. Over the shoulder of Oliver Hazard Perry's Elvis like image, I saw what could be a statue (or was it only a smudge?) just below it. I decided I was too obsessed. There was just an empty fountain there now, I knew. The picture was just blurry.
A few layers down, I found a picture of a burlap wrapped package in the bottom of a basin. "The statue," it read "ready to be put away for the winter." Then another, distant, of a classical female fountain figure in that very same spot.
Eureka! I was off and running. Found a few articles that let me know the piece was a summer fixture in the fountain from the mid 1800's to around 1960. I even found an 1874 magazine article referring to it as the Queen of Aquidneck. So I'm intrigued by the missing piece, and, especially, the fact the no one I've talked to remembers her. Where is she? Is she in someone's private garden as Boston's "Venus Rising from the Mist, or Mrs. bates on the Half-Shell" was? Why doesn't anyone recall her? Etc.
More as events develop...
12:15:21 PM 
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