Unton Memorial Picture, Oil on Panel, Unknown Artist, c.1596.

The Unton Memorial Picture, oil on panel, by unknown artist, c.1596. Note the wonderful skeleton on his shoulder (click on image to see larger version)!

More on the painting, from the London National Portrait Gallery's website (which houses the peice):

This highly unusual narrative portrait of Unton's life was commissioned as a posthumous commemoration by his widow Dorothy Wroughton, and is recorded in her will (1634). At the heart of the composition is the portrait of Unton, flanked by figures of Fame (top left) and Death (top right), and surrounded by scenes from his life and death. These are (anti-clockwise, starting in the bottom right hand corner): 1. As an infant in the arms of his mother, Anne Seymour, formerly Countess of Warwick, at the Unton house of Ascott-under-Wychwood. 2. Studying at Oriel College, Oxford, where he took his degree in 1573. 3. Travelling beyond the Alps to Venice and Padua (1570s). 4. Serving with Leicester in the Netherlands (1585-6), with Nijmegen in the distance. 5. On his embassy to Henry IV at Coucy La Fère in northwest France, in an unsuccessful attempt to avert a peace treaty between France and Spain (1595-6). 6 On his deathbed, with a physician sent by Henry IV. 7. His body brought back to England across the Channel in a black ship. 8. His hearse on its way back to his home at Wadley House, Faringdon, near Oxford. 9. (centre right) Unton's life at Wadley House, with scenes showing him sitting in his study (top), talking with learned divines (bottom left), making music (above left), and presiding over a banquet, while a masque of Mercury and Diana is performed, accompanied by musicians. From the house his funeral procession leads, past a group of the poor and lame lamenting his death, to : 10. (left) Faringdon Church with this funeral (8 July 1596) in progress, and, in the foreground, his monument with Unton's recumbent effigy and the kneeling figure of his widow. More detailed information about this portrait to be found at www.npg.org.uk/research/programmes/making-art-in-tudor-britain/case-studies/the-portrait-of-sir-henry-unton-c.-1558-1596.php.

"A History of Mourning" Richard Davey, 1890

“The body of Inez was lifted from the grave, placed on a magnificent throne, and crowned Queen of Portugal. The clergy, the nobility, and the people did homage to her corpse, and kissed the bones of her hands. There sat the dead Queen, with her yellow hair hanging like a veil round her ghastly form. One fleshless hand held the sceptre, and the other the orb of royalty. At night, after the coronation ceremony, a procession was formed of all the clergy and nobility, the religious orders and confraternities which extended over many miles each person holding a flaring torch in his hand, and thus walked from Coimbra to Alcobaga, escorting the crowned corpse to that royal abbey for interment. The dead Queen lay in her rich robes upon a chariot drawn by black mules and lighted up by hundreds of lights.”

Text and images drawn from A History of Mourning, by Richard Davey, 1890, as found on the wonderful Public Domain Review website.

Click on images to larger, more detailed images. Click here to peruse the entire book. And thanks so very much to Aaron Beebe for sending this along.

Wellcome Object of the Month: Hair Mourning Jewelry

It is easy to miss these four little brooches, tucked away as they are in the far corner of Medicine Man alongside Egyptian canopic jars, mortuary crosses and even a shrunken head. But these examples of European mourning jewellery demonstrate an ambiguity at the heart of Henry Wellcome’s collection – the potential for the human subject to become material object after death.

Medicine Man is full of curios serving as literal or metaphorical extensions of the human body, and, like most medical collections, also features artefacts formerly part of the body itself. These brooches are no exception, each containing samples of human hair, neatly arranged and set behind glass.

Hair is certainly a material that occupies the narrow ground between person and thing – in life as much as death. Although it is ‘dead’ matter (as only the follicle contains living cells), once separated from the body, our hair is capable of outlasting us. These qualities of durability, alongside the fact that it is easily removed from the body and can be manipulated into almost any shape, led to the widespread use of hair in the 18th and 19th centuries as a tangible way to remember an absent loved one. Encased in a locket, ring or brooch, a lock of hair stood in for the recently departed, whose memory, it was hoped, would endure for as long as the jewellery itself.

But detached hair, alienated from its natural location on the body, can also provoke disgust – a reaction any of us who have found a stray hair in our food can identify with. The anthropologist Mary Douglas proposed that any ‘matter out of place’, including hair, becomes dirt, posing the threat of chaos and disorder unless carefully gathered and contained (1966)...

Read the full story from which the above image and text are excerpted on the Wellcome Collection blog by clicking here.

Image: Mourning brooches containing the hair of a deceased relative. Wellcome Images

"All Souls’ Day," William Adolphe Bouguereau (1859)

Lovely mourning painting, courtesy of the incomparable Wurzeltod Tumblr Feed. Thanks, Suzanne, as always!

Goth Panel Discussion at FIT, Thursday October 30

As part of the programming for the Fashion Institute of Technology's current exhibition Gothic: Dark Glamour, the institute is hosting a variety of events to elucidate the slippery subject that is "goth." This Thursday, October 30th, the event du jour will be a panel discussion on goth featuring Morbid Anatomy contributer and co-owner of Obscura Antiques and Oddities Evan Michelson, whose 1870s mourning dress you see pictured above, and Fred Berger, creator of the now defunct Propaganda Magazine.

Hope to see you there!

More details, from the website:

Panel Discussion
Goth Talk
Thursday, October 30, 6-8pm
Katie Murphy Amphitheatre
Fred P. Pomerantz Art and Design Center (D building), 1st floor

Goth subculture has evolved from its post-punk origins to encompass a diverse community from old-school goth to cyber-goth and beyond. Join panelists Fred Berger, photographer and creator of Propaganda magazine; Julia Bloodgood Borden, cultural anthropologist and Morbid Outlook magazine staff writer; Angel Butts, lecturer and PhD candidate; Myke Hideous, artist and musician; and Evan Michelson, owner of Obscura Antiques and Oddities; as they discuss from an insider’s perspective what goth means. Panel moderated by Dr. Valerie Steele, director and chief curator at The Museum at FIT.

To RSVP, call 212-217-4585 or email museuminfo@fitnyc.edu. Visit the website here.

"Sir Thomas Aston at the Deathbed of his Wife," John Souch, 1635

I discovered this wonderful deathbed portrait, which resides at the Manchester Art Gallery, in the book Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual c.1500-c.1800 by Nigel Llewellyn. And yes--the book really is as good as it sounds.

Mourning and Funerary Artifact Exhibition, Slifer House, Lewisburg PA

When visiting my sister in Lewisburg, PA a few weeks ago, we visited an exhibition entitled "Gone, But Not Forgotten: Death & Mourning in Victorian America"--an assemblage of mourning and funerary artifacts drawn from the collection of Galen Betzer, proprietor of Galen R. Betzer Funeral Services, being held at the Slifer Historic House Museum.

The exhibition seeks to explore the customs surrounding death and mourning in the 19th Century; the historical house is draped in black crepe, as if a cherished family member (in this case, family patriarch Eli Slifer) had just died, and each room in the 19th Century mansion features other evidence of mourning, each one painstakingly pointed out and explained by the tour guide.

The exhibit culminates in a small room packed full of mourning and funerary artifacts drawn from Galen's vast and broad collection. This room is filled with an entrancing breadth and magnitude of artifacts such as hair art, mourning stationary, "tear catchers," funeral souvenirs, memorial photographs, a variety of goreyesque hearse designs (see above), hair and other memorial jewelry, coffin plates, mourning clothing, and antique funerary trade literature and promotional materials. The Centerpiece is a small child's coffin, and an elaborate children's hearse dominates the front porch of the house.

All photos above from the exhibition; see the complete set of photographs here. You can find out more information about the exhibition and related events and lectures here. For more information on artworks related to mourning, check out Curious Expedition's recent post The Art of Mourning.

Graveside Portrait Photography, 20th Century

These images are drawn from an article entitled "Ghost World: A Selection of Graveside Portrait Photography from the YIVO archives" featured in Guilt and Pleasure Magazine's current Death Issue. You can read the whole article (and see all the images) here.

Contemporary Post-Mortem Photography

A Colorado nonprofit organization has revived a grieving custom widely practiced in the nineteenth century, particularly in Britain and the United States: the making of photographic portraits of the dead, or "memento mori."

Read whole story on The Victorain Peeper. Make sure to check out the excellent links to 19th Century post-mortem photograph collections (from which these images were drawn) as well.

Jodie Carey, 21st Century

Artworks made from icing, blood, and human hair and taking the form of bones, memorial wreaths, and chandeliers. Good stuff, found via Phantasmaphile.

P.S. Doesn't image 3 look just a little bit familiar?

Jodie Carey, 21st Century

Artworks made from icing, blood, and human hair and taking the form of bones, memorial wreaths, and chandeliers. Good stuff, found via Phantasmaphile.

P.S. Doesn't image 3 look just a little bid familiar?

Memento Mori on the BBC

A nice slideshow on the BBC website called Facing up to Death, featuring Memento Mori and other ways in which we have historically confronted (or avoided) death.

Memorial or Post-Mortem Photography

For some great resources on this once-common practice, check out The Paul Frecker Collection, The Kircher Society Website and The Collection of Collections website. Also, a great piece on the subject by Dan Meinwald called Memento Mori. For books on the topic, Stanley Burns' Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America and its sister volume Sleeping Beauty II: Grief, Bereavement in Memorial Photography American and European Traditions are both excellently written and lavishly illustrated.