LITTLE GIRL IN RED DRESS Artist unknown Area unknown C. 1851 Oil on canvas 36 24" Robertson Collection, Everhart Museum, Scranton, Pennsylvania, 46.64
fan, a common attribute used in portraits of women in American folk art, is folded, suggesting to me a life snuffed out, breathing ended. The Catechism, a compendium of religious knowledge, represents wisdom and the lessons of life. In this painting, the artist paid exceptional attention to the sky in the background. The gradation of color in the sky could be interpreted as a rose-colored dawn, making the world light with the rising of the sun, indicating resurrection, eternal life, and eternal salvation, or it could be interpreted as dusk, symbolizing death and the setting of the sun at the end of life. The unknown artist of this portrait emulated those European artists who worked flower symbolism into their
compositions.'6 "The symbolic meaning of flowers, wellknown to Europeans, developed into a simple and widely accepted 'language of flowers' in America. A detailed knowledge of the floral vocabulary was an integral facet of romance and communications. Beginning in the 1830s numerous books on the language of flowers were published. These editions included poetry and botanical science, but concentrated on assigning meanings to individual flowers. Although not every flower carried symbolic meaning, the language of flowers, as manifested in all forms of art and literature, was believed to demonstrate a cultivated taste and an elevated socioeconomic status. Thus, a dictionary of flower interpretation became an important addition to the library of a lady or gentleman."7 Flowers and blossoms are universal symbols of young life, and in Christian symbolism they represent the transitory nature of earthly beauty, for true everlasting beauty is to be found only in the gardens of heaven. This belief helps explain the long-standing tradition of putting flowers on graves.'8 The downward-pointing bouquet of roses the little girl casually holds was a frequently used symbol of an innocent life cut short.'6 The bouquet also contains ivy and lilies of the valley; the latter, as one of the first flowers of the year, announces spring, the time of rebirth. The urn in the background derives from the standard formulas of both tombstone motifs and nineteenth-century memorial pictures. The flowers it holds are also associated with death: roses for death and ivy for eternal life of the soul. It also includes pansies for remembrance, violets for humility, and ferns associated with humility, because in death we are made humble before God. The vines, because of their durability and permanence, symbolize that which is stable, unchanging, eternal, and by extension, divine.213 Grief has been defined as the complex web of emotions people feel after a death. Mourning is how they express those emotions.21 Posthumous mourning portraits, in which the memory of a loved one is kept alive, are one way in which Americans of the nineteenth century dealt with grief following a death, especially the death of a child. Adults died young, and the mortality rate of infants and children was high. Death was ever-present, a heavenly reunion with loved ones was anticipated, and mourning was conspicuous. The psychological and spiritual impact of death inspired elaborate mourning customs that required equally elaborate tombs, monuments and memento mori, useful and decorative objects that reflect both death's place in the everyday life of a society and that society's attitudes toward the end of life.22 Posthumous mourning portraits helped to keep the circle unbroken, implying that separation was only temporary.23 The use of certain pictorial elements carries symbolic significance when consistently used in conjunction with other emblematic motifs. The symbols used by American folk painters were based on knowledge of the artistic traditions of their European Judeo-Christian forbears, traditions established through the consistent use of symbolic motifs and images to express abstract concepts. The symbols used in these paintings were not selected randomly for decorative purposes, but were chosen consciously to express sorrow, the hope for spiritual immortality, and a
WINTER 1997/98 FOLK ART 03