Funerary art in Puritan New England

The earliest Puritan graves in the New England states of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island, were usually dug without planning, in designated local burial grounds.

Later generations decorated their headstones with carvings, most dramatically in the late 17th century with depictions of death's head, a stylized skull, sometimes with wings or crossed bones.

[3] Although some 300 individual carvers working in New England have been identified, not much is known about the majority of them, with some exceptions including John Lamson of Ipswich, Gershom Bartlett of Bolton, William Mumford of Boston, Josiah Manning and his sons Fredrick and Rockwell of Windham, John Zuricher of Manhattan, the James Foster family of Dorchester, The Stevens Family of Newport,[6] and Nathaniel Holmes (active c. 1805) of Plymouth among others.

Different carving schools emerged across New England, including The John Stevens Shop in Newport, and the Rhode Island carvers Gabriel Allen and Charles Hartshorn, most of whom worked from local slate.

Brownstone was prized due to its manipulative properties making it easier to carve elaborate designs when compared to Granite Schist or Slate, though ironically, these characteristics made the stone more prone to weathering and erosion than the latter materials.

Their use of simplistic, line-drawn imagery was a deliberate rejection of Catholic iconography, a choice also reflected in the design of their churches, portrait paintings and stained glass.

[13] However, in a society that largely rejected visual art as idolatry, images created for funeral rites and headstones themselves were among the few artworks most people in this period would be exposed to.

[14][15] In this, their output reflects a general move towards a more vernacular and direct mode of expression, but practically, the style allowed the production of a far greater number of stylized headstones by removing the need for the carvers having deep workshop experience.

[17] Late 19th century academics tended to view older graveyards as basically museums that were, as the historian Richard Meyer observed, distant "outdoor, spatially delineated repositories of cultural artifacts".

[18] Expanding on this thought, the historian Terry G. Jordan said that, given the artifact's density and state of preservation in New England, "nowhere else [in America] is it possible to look so deeply into our people's past".

Noting how early carvers left no account record of their intentions, and thus their motives could not be interpreted, he observed that there is no remaining instance of any articulated evidence to indicate their "outlook on life and death.

[24] The six styles as described by Hijiya are: The first generation of settlers did not build communal burial grounds, instead they buried their dead on the highest point on their property, and marked individual graves with wooden slabs or field-stones.

[25] The earliest New England Puritan burying grounds date from the 1630s,[25] and were, according to writer Meg Greene, "simply places to deposit the remains of the dead".

[28] The graves had little order to their plotting,[A][26] and were either unmarked or were marked by a wooden sign or an uncut rock, with only very few having simple greenstone or carved headstone,[29] usually with no decorations or ornamentation.

[26] In 1980, the historian Peter Benes described the imagery in a Plymouth County graveyard as containing "menacing stares, impish smiles, and enigmatic facial contortions combine with totally abstract effigies to stop the modern viewer in his tracks, while revealing little of their significance".

In most scholarly overviews, the amateurish carvings are attributed to a lack of tools and know-how on the part of the very early practitioners, who did have access to more experienced stonemasons.

[29] Hijiya goes on to say that the lack of decoration may have reflected that they viewed death as simply an "ordinary, unremarkable aspect of the human condition", absent from any notion of either oblivion or passing on to ethereal life.

They are particularly associated with the Charlestown grave carver Joseph Lamson, who carved imps either pallbearing or adorned with imagery of death and decay such as scythes and hourglasses.

They are more commonly found in southern rather than northern parts of New England, especially in Rhode Island and Connecticut, where from the beginning of the 18th century, the majority of headstone designs were of Cherub or Winged Soul effigies.

Soon carvers such as Obadiah Wheeler of Lebanon and Benjamin Collins of Columbia began adopting soul effigies and other designs inspired by Hartshorne's work.

[43] By the early 19th century, as social classes emerged and became more important, graveyards lost their earlier egalitarian uniformity and simplicity; up until that point, all headstones were of similar size and plots were grouped together.

"[44] She, like other historians, attributes this to a culture of the denial of death, in which large sums of money are spent on "steel lined, gorgeously cushioned caskets [and] air-conditioned tombs".

[5] They often take the format of memento moris:[45] Remember me as you pass by As you are now so once was I As I am now you soon must be Prepare for death and follow me[45] These early examples reflect the pessimistic Puritan outlook of the time in that they do not mention an afterlife or the resurrection of the dead, and the text often includes imagery of worms, decay and dust.

[2] Her book Gravestones of Early New England and the Men Who Made Them, 1653-1800 classified and interprets the artifacts in the context of the dominant religious and cultural influences of their times.

[46] Modern scholars take a more circumspect view, in that most of the early carvers were often amateurs, and although they had basic understandings of iconography, their style and language evolved in a setting cut off from European trends, or a coherent, internal, written discourse.

The historian Richard Meyer largely agrees with Mather's claim and notes how the path of study of these early graveyards understood that such artifacts, "through a variety of complex and often interrelated manifestations, establish patterns of communication (and even dynamic interaction) with those who use or view them".

[46] The next major publication was Allen Ludwig's 1966 book Graven Images: New England Stone Carving and its Symbols, 1650-1815, although it tended to focus on describing specific examples rather than presenting broad overviews or analyses.