Saturday, November 25, 2017

"My children..."; Mourning Art

I am overdue to post some mourning art for mass killings, as I'd intended to do. I can't keep up--I'd need a whole other blog.

I actually hadn't seen the news until I got here to the coffee shop and saw the front page in the newspaper box.
You know. The mosque bombing in Egypt [in the NYT].
"On Saturday, Egypt’s top prosecutor, Nabil Sadek, said in a statement that the death toll had risen and included at least 27 children.
"Mayna Nasser, 40, who was shot twice in the shoulder, drifted in and out of consciousness as he was rushed to a hospital. 'My children were there; my children were there,' he said, according to Samy, a volunteer emergency worker..."
So I went looking for some mourning embroidery, and found instead this Victorian-era painting of a little girl, Effie Elmer, with her doll and pet lamb and cat. 
She was dead when it was painted--it's a memorial, painted by her father, Edwin Romanzo Elmer, c. 1875. That's him and Effie's mother wearing mourning black, in the background. They're in Massachusetts.

 

ABOVE: "Mourning Picture" by Edwin Elmer, ca. 1875,  at Smith College Museum of Art

3 comments:

  1. I wonder if the sheep and the cat are dead too? Notice how all the shadows are very carefully tilted left—every shadow except the girl, the sheep, and the cat. Their shadows go straight behind them and barely connect them to the ground, leaving them almost floating.

    The creepy part of this painting is the dark windows in the house. And the girl’s pained expression.

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