A fountain in a small Ohio town where eighteen painted dogs spray water at a golden bone, one cat sits on the dry rim watching, and nothing about it takes itself seriously.

Most public art arrives by committee. This one arrived because a man in Gambier saw photographs on the internet and could not let them go.

The photographs were of Berczy Park in Toronto, which the Montreal landscape architect Claude Cormier had reopened in June 2017 as a fountain surrounded by twenty-seven cast-iron dogs, all of them looking up at a golden bone on top. There is a cat too, named Pam McCat after the councillor who pushed the project through, and a trough at ground level so real dogs can drink. Phil Samuell decided Mount Vernon should have one. He did not simply copy it: he and his wife Mary drove to Toronto with their golden retriever, Sandy, to see the fountain and meet the man who made it.

What came home is smaller and stranger than the original, which is what makes it worth the detour. Mount Vernon’s version has eighteen dogs rather than twenty-seven, and it is cast aluminum rather than iron, painted rather than patinated — so the animals read as themselves: a dalmatian, an old English sheepdog, a pug, a golden. Around them Cormier’s cast has grown a few extra members with no explanation offered. There is a pony. There are two pairs of birds. There is an apple.

The fabrication deserves its own sentence. Robinson Iron in Alabama cut the molds, and each animal came out of them in pieces — the golden retriever alone is eighty separate parts, welded together, primed, and then hand-painted by Jeff Ritchie, an artist from Mansfield. Stand close and the seams are findable if you want them. Nobody wants them.

The cat is the joke that makes the whole thing work. It sits on the dry stone rim with its tail curled, entirely out of range, watching eighteen dogs get soaked. It is the only figure in the fountain that has clearly thought the situation through.

Five years in, the town has organised around it: a Friends of the Dog Fountain group, a community art exhibit for the fifth anniversary in 2025, and a Best City Street Art in Ohio vote from Midwestern Traveler. That is a lot of civic apparatus for a joke about a bone — and it is the correct amount, because the fountain is doing the thing small-town public art almost never manages. It is not commemorating anything. It is just funny, in daylight, forever.