Anon. Mourning Picture: Regency Woman,Tomb & Lap Dog

An original 18th-century watercolour painting Mourning Picture: Regency Woman,Tomb & Lap Dog.

A beautiful hand-painted English 'mourning picture' dating from the late 18th century, when the mourning theme reached its height of popularity in Britain and the United States. The painting features typical elements of mourning iconography, which combined roots in notions of classical arcadia with fashionable 18th-century style: a woman in diaphanous empire gown languishes by a classical tomb, with attentive lap dog at the fore.

The fashion for mourning pictures can be traced to Angelica Kauffmann's oil painting 'Fame Decorating the Tomb of Shakespeare' c.1772, which was made into an etching a decade later by the English printmaker Francesco Bartolozzi. Mourning subjects achieved such popularity through the wide circulation of such prints and by appealing to contemporary tastes for the sentimental and the picturesque. The universal relevance of the theme also meant amateur artists were particularly drawn to the subject, and mourning images found particular vogue in needlework pictures. So popular was the theme in visual culture, commemorative mourning 'fill in the blanks' lithographs, on which a family could write the name of their lost loved one, were widely disseminated. Displayed in the home or exchanged between friends, such works could become objects of shared feeling and communal response to grief.