What I believe is the most beautiful work of funerary art is found in Rock Creek Cemetery.
It memorializes Marian Hooper Adams, known as Clover to her friends.
Clover was born in Boston’s Back Bay in 1843. Her mother was a poet and a Transcendentalist who died when Clover was five. Her father, a doctor, raised her, and they were very close.
During the Civil War, she volunteered for the U.S. Sanitary Commission, which helped sick and wounded soldiers.
After the war, she was traveling in London and met fellow Bostonian Henry Adams. Henry was American political royalty. The descendant of two US presidents, he’s a historian, poet, and novelist. In 1868, he and Clover moved to Washington and lived near the White House on Lafayette Square.
Clover became a photographer. Photography at this time was very complicated. But she mastered the mechanics of the camera, had an eye for composition, and learned the chemistry of developing film and the art of printmaking.
Clover’s life was shattered when her father died suddenly in 1885. She suffered from severe depression, for which, at that time, there really was no treatment. Later that year, she took her own life by taking potassium cyanide, a chemical used to develop film.
In his grief Henry travels to Japan to study Buddhism in an effort to make sense of this loss. Upon his return, he commissions Augustus Saint-Gaudens to create a memorial for Clover’s grave. And based on his learning in Japan he tells him he wants something calm and reflective. A counterpoint to the anxiety and speed of this world.
It’s set apart from the rest of the cemetery, almost hiding in this grove of trees. The granite base is done by Stanford White. It’s said that Elenore Roosevelt used to sit here in contemplation.
Saint-Gaudens called it “The Mystery of the Hereafter and The Peace of God that Passeth Understanding.” The newspapers called it “Grief.” But Henry was adamant that it remains nameless. The figure is androgynous. It’s not a likeness of Clover. It’s not even supposed to represent grief. Henry said that it is “meant it to ask a question, not to give an answer.”