Mourning and Memory in Georgian and Early American Decorative Arts
Mourning and Memory in Georgian and Early American Decorative Arts
Edited by Christian Answini | Fine Art Department
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, people on both sides of the Atlantic found powerful ways to remember lost loved ones through art and craft. Mourning became not just a private grief but a public ritual expressed in decorative arts – from delicate gold brooches containing a loved one’s hair to elaborate needlework scenes of figures weeping under willows. In this article, we explore how mourning and memory intertwined in British and American objects of this era, through three compelling examples from the upcoming Weiss-Harmon Single Owner Auction: a 1790 English mourning brooch for a husband and wife, an 1806 American silk memorial embroidery for a young child, and a mid-18th-century English sampler with biblical motifs. Each piece illuminates the emotional, social, and religious dimensions of grief in its time, and together they trace a shift from traditional religious iconography to the sentimental neoclassical imagery that came to dominate mourning art.
Lot 53 in the auction is a Georgian gold and enamel mourning brooch made in England in 1790 to commemorate Richer and Elizabeth Davill. At just about 1.5 inches tall, this oval jewel is a tiny yet eloquent tribute. Its front face bears a sepia watercolor miniature on ivory: an elegant woman in classical dress leans on a stone plinth that supports a funerary urn, while a weeping willow droops overhead. Painted in careful detail, the scene personifies grief and remembrance. On the plinth, a motto is delicately inscribed: “Affection weeps, Heaven rejoices.” This tender sentiment captures a common belief of the time – that while the bereaved weep on earth, the departed soul finds joy in Heaven. Around the miniature, the brooch is framed in black enamel with gold lettering naming the deceased and their dates. On the reverse, under a glass cover, lies a compartment of woven hair – locks from Richer and Elizabeth themselves – with an engraved dedication. A pin and loop on the back allowed the piece to be worn as a brooch or pendant, keeping the memory of the loved ones literally close to the heart.
This mourning brooch exemplifies a broader Georgian tradition of mourning jewelry. Such pieces – rings, brooches, lockets, even watch fobs – were personal adornments worn during mourning to commemorate the dead. The custom of distributing mourning rings at funerals was already well-established in 18th-century Britain; indeed, it was common for wills to leave money specifically for this purpose. These tokens served as a form of memory promotion in a time before photography. By the late 1700s, mourning jewelry designs had evolved from the earlier Baroque memento mori style – which often featured skulls, skeletons, and grim reminders of death – to a new, softer visual language rooted in neoclassical art and sentimentalism. The urn-and-willow motif on the Davill brooch is a classic example. These symbols could represent death without showing the actual mortality of the subject, offering a more refined, hopeful iconography. The urn evoked the classical world and the Enlightenment’s humanist approach to death, while the weeping willow – with its branches bent as if in sorrow – symbolized grief in a graceful, natural form.
The motto “Affection Weeps, Heaven Rejoices” itself was a popular inscription in mourning pieces of the era. It signaled the two spheres that mourning jewelry aimed to connect: the earthly realm of affection and sorrow, and the heavenly realm of joy and salvation. The inclusion of the loved one’s hair in the brooch’s back compartment added a deeply personal touch – a literal relic of the deceased. Woven hair in jewelry served as a lasting physical link to the absent beloved, be it a deceased family member or a close friend. Mourning brooches like the Davill example were often custom-made by skilled jewelers in gold with enamel accents. The English ones frequently bear inscriptions of the name, date, and age of the departed, as this one does. These details personalized the jewel and made it a wearable obituary. The practice was not limited to England – by the Federal period in the new United States, jewelers were also producing large quantities of mourning jewelry, portrait miniatures, and hairwork of comparable quality. In an era when death was ever-present, such mourning jewels were more than morbid trinkets; they were badges of love and loss. They allowed the wearer – women, in particular – to signal their bereavement to society while keeping a cherished memory literally pinned close.
Mourning in Silk: Sophronia Burnett’s Memorial Embroidery (1806)
Lot 204 offers a very different medium of mourning art from the same era: a hand-embroidered silk mourning picture made in New England in 1806 in memory of a child, Sophronia Burnett. This piece – a roughly 18 by 16 inch framed needlework scene on silk – would have been lovingly created by a young woman, either a family member or a schoolgirl at an academy, to commemorate little Sophronia, who died at age 6. The embroidered picture presents a poignant garden of grief rendered in thread, paint, and ink. Under the canopy of a weeping willow tree, a lone female figure dressed in mourning black stands beside a tomb or plinth topped with an urn. The scene is stitched with fine silk threads: we see green bushes and grass, the drooping boughs of the willow, and the flowing gown of the mourner. Her face and arms may be delicately painted in ink or watercolor. What truly personalizes this memorial is the inscription attached to the plinth – in this case, remarkably, a small paper clipping bearing the epitaph: “Sacred to the memory of Sophronia Burnett, daughter of Mr. Aaron and Mrs. Eunice Burnett, who departed this life June 6, 1806 in the 7th year of her age.”
This silk mourning embroidery belongs to a well-known genre of schoolgirl art in the post-Revolutionary United States. After 1800, especially following the death of George Washington in 1799, there was a veritable flood of memorial art in America. Female academies and boarding schools for young ladies quickly incorporated “mourning pictures” into their curriculum. Teenaged girls from affluent families would embroider elaborate memorial scenes, often copying popular prints or paintings, to honor either national heroes like Washington or their own departed relatives. These schoolgirl mourning pictures were typically collaborative efforts: a teacher or even a hired professional artist might sketch the design and paint faces or sky, while the student painstakingly stitched the landscape and figures in silk and chenille threads. The result was a beautiful hybrid of art and needlework that families framed and cherished as parlor decorations and family heirlooms.
The iconography of Sophronia Burnett’s memorial is highly representative of these mourning pictures. We have the plinth and urn, the solitary mourning woman, and the archetypal weeping willow. The weeping willow tree had been firmly established as an emblem of sorrow across Europe and America. Likewise, the urn-topped monument in classical style signified the memory of the deceased in a refined way, without graphic violence. Allegorical female figures – often depicted as pensive, graceful mourners – were used almost universally, regardless of the sex or age of the deceased. These figures underscored the emotional narrative of the scene – they invite the viewer to join in the act of mourning and to feel the pathos. Such pieces also frequently incorporated inscribed verses or biblical references that conveyed hope for the afterlife. These served to reinforce the religious consolation behind the visuals. Indeed, the entire practice of memorial needlework had a didactic element: it taught young women to contemplate mortality within the framework of Christian hope, and to demonstrate virtues of industry, patience, and sentimentality.
Piety and Permanence: Hanah Watts’s Ten Commandments Sampler (c.1750)
Lot 196, an English sampler worked by 11-year-old Hanah Watts around 1750, illustrates the older tradition of religious needlework that 18th-century girls engaged in. Hanah’s sampler is a tour-de-force of youthful skill and devotion: the text of the Ten Commandments is stitched at the center, flanked by figures of Moses and Aaron. Above them, putti (cherubs) hover among clouds, and a radiant sun with beams emanating presides over the scene. The lower portion of the sampler bears an inscription reading, “Hanah Watts finished in the eleventh year of her age, Anno Domini.” This sampler’s design is part religious education tool and part decorative showpiece. While not created as a mourning object, it shares motifs commonly found in 18th-century funerary art: winged cherubs and the all-seeing sun were reminders of divine presence over life and death.
Hanah Watts’s sampler reflects the moral and spiritual upbringing of girls in the mid-1700s. At that time, samplers often featured lengthy biblical verses, hymns, or moral poems. The emphasis in this sampler is on religious memory – literally memorizing scripture. The inclusion of Moses and Aaron giving the Law ties the act of stitching to the idea of obedience and piety. Samplers, in this sense, were preparatory for the soul as much as for the household.
Stylistically, this 1750 sampler belongs to an earlier Georgian aesthetic: more Baroque or Rococo in flavor than the cool Neoclassicism of the 1790s mourning brooch. The cherubs with their chubby bodies and wings indicate innocence. The radiant sun at the top could symbolize the glory of God or the light of truth. One might even read it as a metaphor that God’s commandments are the guiding light for the soul. It’s also a familial act of commemoration: many samplers were treasured by families and handed down through generations as a record of a daughter’s upbringing and accomplishments. Producing such pieces reinforced societal and religious expectations of a young girl at the time. In other words, by creating samplers with religious texts or mourning scenes, young women were displaying both their skill with the needle and their internalization of piety and sentiment.
Conclusion
These three objects – a Georgian mourning brooch, an American memorial embroidery, and a mid-18th-century sampler – reveal how mourning and memory were preserved through material culture. They illustrate the evolving symbols and gendered labor of grief in Britain and America, and remind us that while the forms of remembrance may change, the impulse to honor and remember remains timeless.
Sources and Suggested Reading:
Deborah E. Kraak, "Jewelry for Mourning, Love, and Fancy, 1770–1830"
Kimberly Smith Ivey, In the Neatest Manner: The Making of the Virginia Sampler Tradition
Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England
Betty Ring, Girlhood Embroidery: American Samplers & Pictorial Needlework, 1650–1850
Victoria and Albert Museum, "Pandemic Objects: Mourning Jewellery"
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Textile and Needlework Collection
Winterthur Museum, Collections and Exhibitions on Mourning Jewelry
Art of Mourning (online resource and blog)
The Magazine Antiques, Davida T. Deutsch articles on mourning jewelry
Metropolitan Museum of Art, American Decorative Arts Collection
DAR Museum and M. Finkel & Daughter, collections of American samplers and textiles
