Large Fierce Mammal

“Mourning Picture” by Edwin Romanzo Elmer (click the image to enlarge)

In 1890, American artist Edwin Romanzo Elmer (1850–1923) painted the family portrait that is the subject of today’s Dark Sentiment. It depicts the artist, his wife, and their daughter Effie, who died shortly before it was painted. Even a cursory examination reveals the mother  to be shrouded in shadow while the child and everything associated with her in the foreground is bathed in sunlight. Far from being a thing born of the invention of photography, the Memento mori genre includes a significant component of painted portraiture, as we will see in more detail as this year’s season of Dark Sentiments unfolds.

Today renowned for his attention to detail, Elmer is best  known for this particular piece of work which hung in his local post office from 1890 until it was taken down at some point in the 1950’s. It was not until a niece brought it to the attention of the director of the Smith Museum in Northampton, Massachusetts that the artist achieved any kind of notoriety, and the painting remains on display in the Smith College Museum of Art.

In 1965, Adrienne Rich (1929 – 2012) wrote a poem that was both inspired by and titled “Mourning Picture”, addressing the scene in Effie’s words.

Mourning Picture

By Adrienne Rich

They have carried the mahogany chair and the cane rocker
out under the lilac bush,
and my father and mother darkly sit there, in black clothes.
Our clapboard house stands fast on its hill,
my doll lies in her wicker pram
gazing at western Massachusetts.
This was our world.
I could remake each shaft of grass
feeling its rasp on my fingers, draw out the map of every lilac leaf
or the net of vines on my father’s
grief-tranced hand.

Out of my head, half-bursting,
still filling, the dream condenses—
shadows, crystals, ceilings, meadows, globe of dew.
Under the dull green of the lilacs, out in the light
carving each spoke of the pram, the turned porch-pillars,
under high early-summer clouds,
I am Effie, visible and invisible,
remembering and remembered.

They will move from the house,
give the toys and pets away.
Mute and rigid with loss my mother
will ride the train to Baptist Corner,
the silk-spool will run bare.
I tell you, the thread that bound us lies
faint as a web in the dew.
Should I make you, world, again,
could I give back the leaf its skeleton, the air
its early-summer cloud, the house
its noonday presence, shadowless,
and leave this out? I am Effie, you were my dream.