Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Reimagining the Cemetery as Museum | Page 11

Photographs
From sweeping aerial shots of the grounds to detailed
views of grave markers, the photographic collections
at Mount Auburn document the Cemetery’s changing
landscape and contribute greatly to our understanding
of the history of Mount Auburn and the rural cemetery
movement. The holdings include more than 15,000 prints
and negatives and a large slide collection, chronicling
Mount Auburn from the mid-nineteenth century to the
present. Subjects include burials, monuments, mausolea,
buildings, landscape, horticulture, wildlife, maintenance,
staff, events, and programs. The formats and processes used
to create these images span the history of photography,
from stereographs, lantern
slides, and glass-plate
negatives to black-andwhite prints, 35mm slides,
color prints, and digital
images. The images come
from a variety of sources
including Cemetery
records, superintendent
19th Century Cabinet Card
reports, photograph albums,
guidebooks, and general reference files, and the collection
continues to grow.
Of particular interest is the collection of nineteenthcentury stereo views; the twentieth-century Arthur C.
Haskell Collection of black-and-white photographic prints;
and a collection of color transparencies by Alan Chesney,
President of Mount Auburn from 1968 to 1988.

Fine and
Decorative
Arts

Stained Glass
The stained glass in Bigelow Chapel, commissioned by
the Cemetery’s co-founder and second president, Jacob
Bigelow, was created in 1845 and installed when the
Chapel was erected in 1846. The Scottish firm Ballantine
& Allan designed the two large windows—the chancel
window in the north wall and the rose window in the
south wall. The Bigelow windows are hand painted and
leaded in the geometric style. They are the third earliest
known examples of this firm’s work and the first to be
shipped to the United States. The chancel window is set
into a wood frame painted to look like stone, and the rose
window is set into a cast-iron frame. The eight clerestory
windows, which date from the 1920s, are set into cast-iron
frames.
For Story Chapel, the Cemetery commissioned stained
glass from the Boston studio of Wilbur H. Burnham in
the ornamental Gothic Revival grisaille pattern, dating
to 1930; Boston artisan E. E. Sanborn designed the large
chancel window with figures of Christ and saints, circa
1928. The opalescent windows date from the construction
of the building in 1896–98.

Significant Monument Collection
A small number of the approximately sixty thousand
memorials at Mount Auburn are highly significant, works
that stand out as either rare, reflective of a historically
significant era, representative of a known artist, associated
with a noted individual, or valued by the community. These
significant monuments are an essential part of our cultural
landscape and many are in need of preservation work.
Range of material from the Historical Collections on display as part of a
past Cambridge Open Archives event.

The Cemetery’s
Fine and
Decorative
Arts include
commissioned
works as well as
purchases and
Displaying the Collections: A nineteenthgifts. Mount
century porcelain pin tray featuring the
Cemetery’s Egyptian Revival Gateway.
Auburn holds
several nineteenthcentury oil paintings, sculptures, and decorative artworks
for Story and Bigelow Chapels, in addition to prints,
watercolors, drawings, and contemporary works of art. Of
note are an 1832 souvenir tea cup, a nineteenth-century
china pin tray, and an 1849 girandole set with Bigelow
Chapel as the motif. Researchers will also find among the
holdings chapel textiles, forged iron tools, gatekeeper’s
helmets, and award medals from the Massachusetts
Horticultural Society.
2016 Volume 1 | 9