Anonymous mourning art for Harriet Rogers and her infant daughter and another Wilcox family member.
[Marshall County, Illinois? Tazewell County, Illinois? n. p., ca. 1844]. Single leaf (12.38 x 17 inches), wax crayon, ink and wash on heavy stock. Old creases from folding. Some staining and browning; a few small paper repairs to the verso; in good condition. Item #22637
Hints of Transcendental Romanticism in the early Midwest, a fine characteristic mourning scene of a woman leaning against a gravestone inscribed, “To the Memory of Harriet Rogers, who Died Feb. 14th, 1844 Aged 32 Years 4 Months,” situated among a few scattered tombstones in a bucolic churchyard cemetery, with an autograph fair copy of verses beginning, “They tell me that my sister dear, Is sleeping with the dead”—which seem first to have appeared over the name Mary in the Ladies’ Repository of Cincinnati, January, 1842. The fragmentary genealogical clues attached to this piece of folk art would seem to point to the first wife of physician Thomas P. Rogers (1812-1899), friend of Stephen A. Douglas and eventual early resident of Bloomington, Illinois, where this cataloger was born. The capsule biography of Dr. Rogers provided by the McLean County Museum of History notes, “Dr. Rogers was married twice. In June 1840 he married Harriet Wilcox of North Bergen, New York. The couple had one daughter, Harriet Julia, who died at the age of nine months. Rogers’s wife Harriet followed her daughter in death only four years after she and Rogers wed.” An infant Julia Harriet [sic] is here noted on a gravestone, as is an infant Harriet Wilcox, dead in November 1844—which would seem to accord with an infant buried in Lacon, Illinois and perhaps Wilcox who had also moved from Genesee County, N, Y. to Illinois.
Price: $1,250.00