Today this image showed up in my facebook feed, along with the following caption:

Joined armchairs like this one brought cemetery art into the home. The squared back, arched top, and carved ornament of this chair closely resemble the form and decoration of seventeenth-century gravestones. Some joined armchairs were adorned with names and dates, linking them even more closely to cemetery iconography. Happy Halloween from The Chipstone Foundation!

This got me thinking about visual literacy. When I look at this chair, I don’t see a gravestone. Why?  Because I don’t really know what 17^th century gravestones look like. I am not familiar with 17^th century North American cemetery iconography. Clearly, this needed to be rectified! But how?

I turned to the Library collection first, but was somewhat frustrated by my search for gravestones. The Highsmith collection has lots of photographs of gravestones, but the creation date in the catalog is the creation date of the photograph, not the headstone. A more general search, not limited to images, led to an amazing resource that I had forgotten: The American Antiquarian Society’s Farber Gravestone Collection. It is a database of more than 13,500 images documenting the imagery on more than 9,000 gravestones from New England, mostly dating from before 1800.

This collection is cataloged with data for the various decorative elements. I wondered if that flower in the center of the back of the chair could be found on a gravestone. I was in luck; “rosette” is one of the categories for decorative elements. A little limiting of dates to generate results from the 17^th century gave me this example 

Andrew Neal’s gravestone from 1684 in Boston, MA, with rosettes on either side. The columns on Elizabeth Avery’s stone, pictured below, from 1724 are reminiscent of those on the back of the red oak arm chair.

There’s so much to wonder about; from the materials to the imagery, and mourning traditions. I am also intrigued by the idea of having a gravestone-style chair: why? and who would sit there? A primary source analysis exercise using gravestones seems like it would be an appropriate Halloween activity!  6 - 8 9 - 12 Art/Music Library Social Studies/History UArts