Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn The Art of Memory: Monuments Through Time | Page 3

the Art of Memory
Photo, ©Alan L. Ward, circa 1980’s
Mount Auburn’s Monuments Through Time
by Meg L. Winslow, Curator of Historical Collections and Melissa Banta, Consulting Curator, Historical Collections
“T
Blueprint, Shaw &
Hunnewell Architects, 1889
he poet and the sculptor
have here combined their
skill with nature, till this
has become one of the most lovely spots
in the vicinity of Boston,” an observer
of Mount Auburn Cemetery wrote in
1849 1 . For nearly two centuries, Mount
Auburn has commemorated the lives of
more than 97,000 individuals with burial
markers and memorials. Today, amid the
contemplative beauty of its landscape and
horticulture, visitors to the Cemetery find
an infinitely rich tapestry of memorials
expressing devotion, affection, and loss–
a visual language of the deeply human act
of remembering.
Mount Auburn’s landscape includes
funerary monuments representing almost
200 years of architectural style and signifi-
cance, from works of fine art to vernacular
carvings. Within the context of the natural
landscape, these commemorate objects,
with their striking forms and geometry,
create a compelling visual experience, a
balance of art and nature as envisioned by
the Cemetery founders.
Mount Auburn was one of the first
locations in Boston to exhibit sculpture in
the 19th century, and the Cemetery played
a major role in developing the careers of
artists who produced these works. “Until
1840, sculpture had attracted very little
attention in Boston,” scholar Frederic A.
Sharf writes. “Within the next decade
sculpture usurped the artist limelight of that
city. One major factor in the city’s life lay
at the root of this artistic transformation –
the establishment of Mount Auburn
Cemetery.” 2 Local guidebooks to Mount
Auburn highlighted routes leading visitors
to the Cemetery’s more popular memorials.
As Mount Auburn, and other cemeteries
modeled after it, transformed into gardens
of sculpture, they generated a new demand
for funerary art in America.
Among Mount Auburn’s hills and valleys,
ponds and plantings, are more than 60,000
memorials — a sweeping range of styles from
Egyptian to Classical Greek and Roman,
from simple markers to lavish Baroque
display—reflecting the eclectic breadth of
American funerary design over the past
century and a half.
Fall 2013 | 1