Maria Scheuch gazes out impassively at us from her funerary portrait in Glenwood Cemetery.
Tag Archives: Glenwood Cemetery
Olde school!
Old weathered tombstones are by turns heartbreaking and annoying. But you can see why people were enamored of them when you come across a crisp, fresh example.
The life beyond
A fascinatingly literal conceit on an otherwise handsome obelisk monument.
The all-seeing eye!
A monstrous surprise awaited me at Glenwood Cemetery today.
TFW?!
Here, ladies and gentlemen, is a mausoleum, in Glenwood Cemetery in Washington, D.C., designed by a spooney architect (figure 1). Now before I go an inch further, let me concede that if you ignore the details and slip the image a little out of focus, you have a fairly banal basic plan. The mausoleum is […]
Funerary portraits to order
The reader may know that I am looking into American funerary portraits. Searching turns up a fair number of them, but there is always a question of whether portrait statues or busts in the wild were made for the tomb or were repurposed from a domestic setting. It’s therefore time to touch base with theory, […]
P.M.G.
I note first that the marker has been vandalized in the past and carefully restored. Who vandalizes a grave? P GMERECTED BY HIS COMRADESTHE PRESIDENT’S MOUNTED GUARDIN MEMORYOFENSIGN JOS. CHAP. PECKWHO DEPARTED THIS LIFESEPTR 1ST 1857IN THE 24TH YEAR OF HIS AGE There doesn’t seem to be anything online about the organization of the President’s Mounted […]
The artist, the grave, and the sonnet
Augustus Goodyear Heaton, a.k.a. Augustus George Heaton, had his middle name legally changed at the age of 78 in 1922. Born in Philadelphia in 1844, he passed much of his career in Washington, D.C. He died in Sibley Hospital there in 1930 and was buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia. On the right is […]
The Victor Blundon and Mr. Knickers portrait
Apart from the Schnebels, who died decades earlier, the burials here fall in the period from 1936 to 1959. The first of the “modern burials” is that of Victor, who takes the siege d’honneur in the bas relief, and whose death presumably occasioned the commission of the monument. Other family members mostly in the same […]
Hard Knox
Let’s look at this monument before we consider the man, except to date the monument to the period probably soon after his death in March 1892. The monument is run-of-the-mill bog standard for the 1890s, an obelisk influenced both by the Egyptian revival and the erection of the Washington Monument in the Capital City where […]
