Carved and painted wood memorial: Gate of Heaven Possibly Maine, mid 19th century

Found in Maine
Marguerite Riordan, Stonington, Connecticut, 1973

"Folk Art Revealed," New York, American Folk Art Museum, November 16, 2004-August 23, 2009

American Radiance: The Ralph Esmerian Gift to the American Folk Art Museum, p. 352, fig. 315

Old, minor chips and shrinkage cracks. Chips in the painted surface and general wear. Overall condition is sound.
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This rare wooden memorial vignette utilizes motifs that are much more frequently encountered in two-dimensional mediums, particularly schoolgirl needlework and watercolors. As records of accomplishment of female students, embroidered and painted memorial artworks that commemorated departed family members decorated the walls of countless American homes in the nineteenth century. In this carving, a stone mausoleum with heavy double doors and three ball spires is set in a rising landscape and flanked by two stylized willow trees. The symmetry of the composition is in keeping with neoclassical ideals of harmony and noble tranquility, while its imagery was part of a shared design vocabulary known to artists in all walks of life.

The carving can also be seen to reference the rural cemetery movement, which had wide-ranging influence in mid-nineteenth-century America. By integrating romantic landscape design with symbolic architecture and memorial sculpture, these parklike sites offered the public a serene setting in which to visit the graves of loved ones, stroll the grounds, and otherwise contemplate immortality. They were also popular spots for picnics and other family outings. Established in 1831, Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the first such cemetery in the United States, followed by Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia in 1836 and Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn in 1838.¹ By midcentury these sites had inspired similar, if more modestly scaled, cemeteries in cities and towns across the country, Found in Maine, this carving presents an idealized image of one such bucolic setting. -R.S.

¹ For a contemporary source on Mount Auburn and Green-Wood that includes a number of fine engravings, see Nehemiah Cleaveland and Cornelia W. Walter, The Rural Cemeteries of America (New York: R. Martin, 1847). Recent scholarship includes Blanche Linden-Ward, Landscape of Memory and Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1989), David Charles Sloane, The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in  American History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1991), and Jonathan L. Fairbanks and Rebecca Ann Gay Reynolds, "The Art of Forest Hills Cemetery," The Magazine Antiques 154, no. II (November 1998): 69 6-703.