This fountain stands beside Basel’s main art gallery, the Kunstmuseum. It was wrought in war-time 1941 by Alexander Zschokke, a Basel-born sculptor and architect who had returned here from his teaching post in Düsseldorf in 1937. There he had earlier been a close colleague of Paul Klee, who was forced to flee to Switzerland from Nazi persecution in 1933.

The three figures atop the dado represent the three ages of man. The obscured figure is Youth, handily substituted by a pair of excitable young men in the foreground of this shot. The relief figures around the dado mimic a Roman sarcophagus, yet are reminiscent of the suffering hell-goers common in Renaissance works, with the added horror that many have streams of water issuing from their mouths.

Numerous other works by Zschokke populate Basel, and one or two may well feature later in this travelogue.