c.1790 German Neoclassical Mourning Ring

A c.1790 German Neoclassical mourning ring, with a mixed-media polychrome composition of a cherub accompanying a Grecian urn painted with the date ‘10 Aug (17)90”, all against a ground of foiled royal blue paste and set beneath cover glass within a halo of rose cut diamonds. Unlike British counterparts, continental mourning rings often do not bear an inscription naming the deceased. 18th c date-inscribed jewelry were most commonly made to commemorate life events considered the Parish register “big three”: births, marriages, and deaths; the first two being sentimental in nature while the last being mourning. While some miniature-work jewels blur the line between mourning and sentimental, the present ring is almost certainly mourning in character. The distinctively shaped seed pearl tree—elongated, extremely conical—is a topiary stylization associated with the Italian cypress (Cupressus sempervirens), which since classical antiquity has been a symbol of mourning and remains to this day the principal cemetery tree in Europe. Cypress wreaths were used in both Greek and Roman funerary rites and adorned statues of Pluto/Hades, god of the underworld. A small fly, a symbol of death and transformation, hovers above the urn, which itself is another funerary symbol from the Greco-Roman tradition.

The ring’s German character is reflected in its colorful palette, which stands in marked contrast to the often sombre sepia tones of mourning jewelry made elsewhere. Compositional similarities can be spotted in a late 18th c German mourning ring in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (01.6608), and in another Neoclassical German mourning illustrated in “Gedenke mein Freundschafts- und Memorialschmuck” by Gisela Zick (pl. 12). Including the present example, all three rings feature a mixed-media blend of watercolor, microivory, seed pearls, gold wires and foils, and fibers. In particular, the interior border of dotted and scalloped gold foil shared by all three rings is a uniquely German trait, as is the bed of green painted fibrous ‘grass’ lining the bottom of the compositions. The Boston MFA ring is also particularly analogous to the present example in the design of the engraved shank, as well as the overall background design of white watercolor floral sprays against foiled blue glass. Made at a time when central European countries were impoverished by the Napoleonic Wars and the French occupation, German miniature-work jewelry is a form of “creative thrift”, substituting gems with inexpensive materials made valuable through labor-intensive craft. These jewels are nearly always compositionally full, packed with details and motifs reflecting late 18th c Enlightenment secularism, a shared culture of bourgeois literacy, and a ‘cult’ of friendship and feeling.
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