Sunday Morning in Deep Waters

01 / The story of this place

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Swedish American sculptor Carl Milles created 'Sunday Morning in Deep Waters,' a bronze fountain depicting the sea god Triton with thirteen sons, for the University of Michigan's Ingalls Mall between Burton Memorial Tower and the Michigan League. Charles Baird, the university's first athletic director, commissioned the piece in 1940 as a memorial to his friend Thomas McIntyre Cooley, a founding faculty member of Michigan's law school who went on to serve as a justice of the Michigan Supreme Court. Milles designed the sculpture while serving as sculptor-in-residence at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, one of many works he produced during his long American career there. The fountain became part of Michigan student tradition, with incoming freshmen wading through it toward the Diag and graduating seniors retracing the steps in reverse toward Rackham Graduate School. Decades of exposure eventually damaged the bronze and stonework, and the university completed a major restoration of the fountain in 2018.

1. Bronze fountain by Carl Milles, sculptor-in-residence at Cranbrook
2. Commissioned in 1940 as a memorial to jurist Thomas Cooley
3. Depicts the sea god Triton and his thirteen sons
4. Center of a long-running University of Michigan student tradition
5. Restored in 2018