On a chilly Sunday morning in December 1885, Henry Brooks Adams pulled on his winter coat and stepped out onto the front portico of his home on Lafayette Square across from the White House. Perhaps he was feeling some discomfort, for by all accounts Adams, the well-known descendant of two presidents, was on his way to visit a dentist. Before he had ventured far on the tree-lined street, however, he encountered an acquaintance arriving to see his wife. Adams turned back, reentering the three-story stone house on H Street to call her. Met by silence, he climbed the stairs to an upper room. There he found forty-two-year-old Marian Hooper Adams slumped unconscious on a rug in front of a fireplace. The celebrated Washington hostess, a talented amateur photographer, had poisoned herself by drinking potassium cyanide, a toxic chemical used in developing film. A doctor, hastily summoned, could do nothing to revive her. Her body, still warm to Henry’s first anxious touch, grew cold and rigid—an insensate corpse replacing the vibrant woman he had loved.1 Thus began for a shaken Henry Adams the unrelenting cycle of grief, remorse, questioning, self-doubt, anger, and psychic exhaustion that haunts the survivors of suicides.
Adams equated his experience with “Hell”—describing himself as unsteady, not “calm,” and not “myself” in days to come. “Life could have no other experience so crushing,” he wrote one friend. “This wretched bundle of nerves, which we call mind, gives me no let up,” he told another. “All my energy is now turned to the task of endurance,” he confided in a letter to Oliver Wendell Holmes two weeks later.2 At the same time, he realized that others shared a similar sorrow, reporting, “My table was instantly covered with messages from men and women whose own hearts were still aching with the same wounds, and who received me … into their sad fraternity.”3
Adams’s search for release from ceaseless waves of dark and troubling thoughts became a consuming obsession but also a generative force with an impact beyond his own great loss. For this personal tragedy led him on a quest for a consoling, cathartic beauty that he hoped would ease his mental torment and restructure others’ perceptions. The result, more than five years later, was the Adams Memorial, designed by sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens in a setting by Beaux-Arts architect Stanford White.
One of the most extraordinary American funerary monuments of the nineteenth century, the bronze figure sits meditating on a granite seat in a quiet Washington, D.C., cemetery. Called a modern “sphinx” for its quality of shrouded mystery, it became the most widely known and influential of a number of figurative grave memorials—including the moving Milmore monument in Boston—that were completed by some of the nation’s finest artists in the 1890s (Plates 1, 2).
These memorials were sometimes created in highly personal relationships between survivor and sculptor. Artists like Frank Duveneck and the elderly William Wetmore Story made memorials to their wives after suffering loss (Plates 3, 4). Models, photographs, or replicas of the new “high-style” sculptural monuments were later displayed in arts exhibitions and in such elite venues as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as well as in the precincts of death, inspiring other patrons, artists, and artisans to imitate or attempt to rival these achievements. The new memorials, frequently undertaken in partnership with architects and landscapers, helped to change the face of the American cemetery, already in the process of transformation in the decades following the Civil War. Among patrons and fine artists a great interest was developing in beautifying the cemetery following the deaths of 620,000 in the war. The land, pierced by shovels and turned repeatedly to make way for the casualties of military battles, was being heaved and hewn into the foundation for a new aesthetic, a more unified and centrally managed landscape of sensations. New attitudes toward mortality and mourning were emerging alongside a growing industry manned by deathways professionals ranging from undertakers to cemetery managers.
The artists who created this generation of private memorials avoided older sentimentalism and often modified or cast aside standard elements of religious symbolism and the reassuring inscriptions about the afterlife that had characterized many earlier monuments. They turned their sculptures into statements about modern life and death by seeking to meld grief and wonder in a nonverbal form. Death, their cemetery sculptures still tell us today, remains an event beyond human comprehension, even for faithful Christians. Survivors must learn to value their inability to explain it and turn its mournful riddle into a positive power that stimulates the imagination and the heart. They must come to revere its sheer mystery, cloaked in an aura of beauty in the cemetery, where an awe of nature and art can spur meditation on universal questions.
The monuments were intended to be vessels for catharsis, meant to console, but they also served other purposes. They could manipulate and mask, becoming vehicles for instilling an emotional and social legacy, or for denial of such negative emotions as guilt and excessive grief by individuals who above all feared loss of control over their feelings and reputations—turn-of-the-century Americans who lived with a dread of ridicule and shame.
Elite patrons and artists hoped that reverent and respectful spectators would find in their sculptures suggestions of dignity, nobility, serenity, order, and refinement—forms of beauty and peaceful stability in a situation that by its very nature was full of trauma and uncertainty. The artworks often denied or veiled the ugliness of death and the fragility or baseness of human motives. They participated in a struggle for grace amid wrenching societal change in the postwar era and, eventually, in a post-Darwinian age, when elites such as Boston’s Brahmin class sensed a fracturing of life’s wholeness. Placed in lovely outdoor garden settings, the memorials linked death with the processes of nature’s sensuous cycle of lush foliage, entropy, changing seasons, and renewal. But in their silence about deep human fears surrounding the pain and gruesomeness of death—taboo topics—they left a residual trace about the real meanings of grief. “Silence itself—the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name … functions alongside the things said,” the philosopher Michel Foucault noted.4
Evolving in dialogue with older, more highly ornamented forms of sepulchral sculpture and with the rise of American art museums, these exceptional 1890s cemetery monuments were reinterpreted in the early twentieth century. A generation of Americans discovered them through personal pilgrimage or, more often, through widely distributed reproductions and illustrated popular magazines and newspapers. But these diverse “outsider” audiences viewed the monuments through the lens of an increasingly urbanized consumer society now influenced by mass media, advertising, varying forms of public spectacle, specialization and professionalization of labor, and new modes of mass manufacture and replication. With the rise of motion picture technology, the multiple funeral processions for assassinated President McKinley were captured by Thomas Edison’s cameras in 1901, for example, after a little-known commercial sculptor named Eduard Pausch had carefully measured the president’s features and preserved them in the form of a plaster death mask that could be the basis for memorial statues.
By 1900 Sears Roebuck & Co. and Tiffany, among others, offered alternative choices for memorialization, raising questions about what standards an individual should apply in choosing a grave marker and what constituted “value” in this realm. Against all this, the public received turn-of-the-century classicizing renderings of restrained emotion with new understandings of the boundaries between high taste and low farce, social distance and intimacy, and the refined longing to encounter alien and exotic forms versus an almost gleeful pleasure in the grotesque, the excessive, and the weird. The Adams Memorial became popularly known as Grief, a title hinting at passion uncontrolled—far from the peaceful meditation about the mystery of death, the representation of a psychic state beyond mere grief that Henry Adams had sought. Meantime, Pausch and other sculptor-artisans “pirated” its design for the graves of people who had never known the Adamses.
This book attempts to set out at least part of the story of how high-style funerary sculpture functioned at the turn of the twentieth century and in the decades immediately after, a subject little investigated to date by scholars. These monuments have not been considered in terms of their wider context and shifting use as objects of consolation, power, and multisensory mystery and wonder. Rather, they have mostly been considered as oddities, a part of an individual artist’s oeuvre, a detail of a patron’s biography, or as local civic cemetery history. Why did new forms—many of them now produced in bronze rather than stone and placed in architectural settings—arise just at this time, and how did they mesh or clash with the sensibilities of their era? Why was there a gap between the intention of these elite patrons and artists, whose lives were often intertwined in a closed circle, and the way some public audiences received them through the filter of the mass media?
The book seeks to address these issues in part through the medium of individual lives. It accepts that many aspects of memorialization overlap, with outdated styles living on even until today beside new ones—baby lambs and crosses carved in stone next to laser-etched portraits of the deceased on polished black granite. It in no way claims to cover the entirety of this rich area. Many intersections with issues of gender, ethnicity, and regional differences, among other topics, remain for future scholars to explore. For this project is ambitious enough. Some of the tales it relates turn out to be stranger than fiction, venturing into the realm of a variety of private understandings that largely went unspoken.
Death is above all about absence and emptiness. It is often met with public silence, and this makes difficult going for historians. This narrative thus begins with four intertwined tales of personal loss in the 1880s for which a significant record remains. Then it places the key players’ decisions in a wider social, historical, and artistic context and traces their monuments’ creation, influence, and reception in the hope that they will help us to understand the larger story: how survivors used cemetery memorials as a vehicle to mourn and remember, and how their meaning changed over time.