Mourning Jewellery
Mourning jewellery is body adornment that signals a death, binds the memory of a deceased person, or does both at once - since the 17th century a jewellery type in its own right, with a material language of its own.
Written by Dr. Helene Vasall
Mourning jewellery is the oldest independent genre of remembrance jewellery. Unlike jewellery of love, of rank or of faith, it points to a specific death - through material, colour, inscription or the incorporation of a bodily remnant such as hair, ashes or, in the 21st century, a fingerprint. That it exists at all as a self-contained category is a European peculiarity of the 17th to 20th centuries; before and after, the boundary between mourning jewellery and general sentimental jewellery is fluid.
This entry is the overview - anyone looking for a particular term can jump straight into one of the clusters at the foot of the page.
What mourning jewellery actually is
A piece of jewellery becomes mourning jewellery not through its material alone, but through the gesture with which it is put on. Three features recur in the historical sources from the 17th century onward:
- Choice of material: restrained, often matte black, in Prussia made of iron rather than gold - a deliberate renunciation of lustre.
- Inscription or date: date of death, initials, a scriptural verse, a motto such as Not lost but gone before.
- Incorporation of a bodily remnant: a lock of hair, from the 19th century a piece of hairwork, in the 20th a photograph, today fingerprint jewellery, a pinch of ashes or a memorial diamond grown from ashes.
One of these features is enough. A plain gold ring with a date of death inside is mourning jewellery; so is an opulent black jet necklace with no reference to any person - the latter then signals only the phase of mourning, not the specific deceased.
A brief history by era
17th century - memento mori. The first European mourning rings are bequests from the deceased themselves, issued by will to named beneficiaries. They bear skulls, hourglasses, skeletons - the iconographic vocabulary of memento mori - and inscriptions such as Memento finis. The gesture is religious: the wearer is to be reminded daily of their own death.
18th century - sentimentalisation. The jewellery becomes more intimate. The sepia miniature appears - minute ink paintings with weeping willow, urn and a mourning figure, often on ivory, often with the deceased person's hair worked into them. The lover's eye, the painted eye pendant, can be jewellery of love and of mourning at the same time.
19th century - industry and code. The Victorian age turns mourning jewellery into a mass-produced article. Whitby on the English North Sea coast becomes the world trading centre for jet, in Berlin Berlin iron is cast into filigree rosettes, in France French jet - in fact black glass - flourishes. A strictly graduated order of court mourning prescribes which jewellery is permitted in which phase of mourning (see Widow's Jewellery).
20th century - disappearance and return. With the First World War, formal court mourning ends among the middle classes; mourning jewellery drops out of fashion. What remains is widow's and family jewellery with photographs, occasionally still a black brooch. Only in the closing decades of the 20th century - through goldsmiths with a feminist and conceptual agenda - does personalised remembrance jewellery return.
21st century - personalisation. Technical forms dominate today: fingerprint jewellery, ash pendants, memorial diamonds. Black plays almost no role any more; the one-of-a-kind piece takes its place. Four paths of personalisation shape current practice: fingerprint, engraving, hairwork, ashes - often combinable.
Materials and their language
The material carries most of the meaning. Jet (fossilised wood) is the Victorian showpiece material because it is deeply black, light, and warms in the hand - a stone that does not feel cold. Onyx is its industrial counterpart, harder and more evenly coloured. Berlin iron, devised from 1813 as a substitute for donated personal gold jewellery during the Wars of Liberation, becomes politically charged widow's jewellery of Prussian provenance. Vulcanite and bog oak are the cheaper middle-class variants.
The body-proximate substances form a material class of their own: hair, later ashes, today the digitally captured fingerprint. They bind a piece of jewellery to exactly one person. The techniques for doing so - hairwork, sepia hair painting, ash encapsulation, laser engraving of the fingerprint - are chapters in their own right.
Symbolism
The pictorial language of mourning jewellery is remarkably stable. Since antiquity the urn has stood for ashes and thus for the person after death, the weeping willow for the bower that gathers the tears. The anchor is not maritime in meaning but Pauline: hope as the "sure anchor of the soul" (Heb 6:19). The butterfly - symbol of the soul - joins in during the 20th century; forget-me-not and ivy have belonged to the standard grammar since the 18th. Memento mori imagery (skull, hourglass, winged death) largely disappears in the 19th century; it comes to be felt as too drastic.
Mourning jewellery today
Anyone commissioning a piece of jewellery after a death in the 21st century rarely chooses black. What they do choose is usually one of four personalisations:
- Fingerprint - the body-proximate impression is cut into gold, silver or platinum, frequently in a ring, a pendant or a cufflink plate. Capture is nowadays digital, either directly at the coffin or during life at a visit to the workshop; the image is optimised and passed to the manufactory.
- Engraving - initials, date of death, or the deceased person's handwriting captured from a photograph.
- Hairwork - a small lock under rock crystal or a plaited thread in a hollow setting.
- Ashes - as a pinch in a tightly sealed capsule or as powder in transparent synthetic resin.
- Memorial diamond - the stone grown from ashes or hair as the central setting (see Memorial Diamond).
In every case the same rule applies: the piece should be wearable every day, therefore light, skin-friendly, unobtrusive. The heavy brooch of the Victorian widow is today a ring or a necklace that nobody in an office environment is obliged to recognise as mourning jewellery.
How to classify mourning jewellery
Anyone wishing to place a historical piece proceeds in this order:
- Identify the material - black material? Then the material cluster (jet, onyx, Berlin iron, French jet, vulcanite, Bakelite as the 20th-century substitute).
- Check for inscription or date - even initials alone are enough to narrow down the dating.
- Open hollow settings - many apparently conventional pieces contain hairwork, locks of hair or miniatures under rock crystal.
- Wear marks - mourning rings often show heavy wear on the little finger, because they were worn for decades.
For modern pieces the classification is easier: maker, occasion for the commission and, where applicable, the incorporated bodily impression are recorded in the workshop documentation.
Sensitive subjects
Mourning jewellery touches on hard subjects: stillborn children, pet bereavement, suicide. We treat them in entries of their own - Memorial Jewellery for Stillbirth and Infant Loss, Pet Memorial Jewellery - and always without pathos. Anyone commissioning a piece for a stillborn child needs no literary accompaniment, but craftsmanlike clarity and respect for the haste in which such a decision is often made.
Themes surrounding this term
This pillar page draws the wider arc - the clusters below lead into material, form, symbolism and modern practice.
Core concepts
4- Memento moriMemento mori is the Christian-Stoic exhortation to be mindful of one's own death - and at the same time the iconographic soil from which European mourning jewellery of the 17th century grew.
- Memorial JewelleryMemorial jewellery is jewellery that deliberately binds itself to one particular person - through an inscription, a photograph, hair, ashes or, the defining medium today, a digitally captured fingerprint.
- Sentimental JewellerySentimental jewellery is the jewellery of the age of sensibility between 1760 and 1840 - pieces in which love, friendship and grief share the same imagery, and in which hair, miniature painting and personal inscriptions first become the load-bearing form.
- Widow's JewelleryWidow's jewellery is the graduated mourning jewellery worn by widows in the 19th century according to a strictly codified plan of court mourning - from deep matte black to half-mourning lilac, each phase with its own materials and its own formal language.
Periods
7- Art DecoArt Deco (1920–1939) is the first jewellery epoch without a ritualised canon of mourning - shaped by geometric rigour, machine aesthetics and a decisive rejection of the sentimental mourning fashions of the nineteenth century; memorial jewellery becomes private, understated and formally absorbed into the general jewellery line rather than set apart as its own genre.
- Baroque (c. 1600–1750)The Baroque is the mourning-jewellery epoch of drastic memento mori imagery: skull rings, skeleton pendants, hourglasses, scythes and inscriptions such as *Hodie mihi, cras tibi* define a mourning jewellery that does not euphemise death but makes it visible as a constant, almost gladly displayed admonition.
- Biedermeier (1815–1848)Biedermeier is the German-speaking mourning-jewellery epoch between the Congress of Vienna and the revolution of 1848 - a bourgeois, introverted period of forget-me-nots, Berlin iron and hairwork mosaic, with an understanding of mourning jewellery oriented more towards the family and the private sphere than towards the court.
- Jugendstil (Art Nouveau)Jugendstil, or Art Nouveau (1890–1910), is the last jewellery epoch with a mourning symbolism of its own before the rupture of the First World War - defined by floral, organically curving forms, mystical symbolism and a tendency to soften the strict Victorian mourning codes into a poetic, naturalistic language of remembrance.
- The Edwardian Era (1901–1910/1914)The Edwardian era is the brief transitional period between the Victorian system of mourning jewellery and its final collapse in the First World War - a time of loosening codes, of refinement in materials (platinum, diamond) and of the first decided *weakening* of formal mourning obligation.
- The Georgian Era (1714–1837)The Georgian era spans the reigns of the four kings George I to George IV and of William IV in Britain. In mourning jewellery it is the epoch in which sentimental jewellery was invented - sepia hair painting, the lover's eye, the miniature portrait on ivory, and the posy ring in transition to the memento mori ring.
- The Victorian Era (1837–1901)The Victorian era is the heyday of mourning jewellery - a period of more than sixty years in which court mourning codes, industrial mass production, new materials (jet, vulcanite, Berlin iron) and Queen Victoria's personal widowhood combined to produce a system of public and private mourning visibility without precedent in European history.
Materials
15- AmberAmber - fossilised tree resin, above all from the Baltic region - was worked in the 19th century as a light brown or reddish alternative to black Whitby jet and is today the bearer of its own East-Central and Eastern European mourning jewellery tradition, with casting-in techniques for modern memorial substances.
- Berlin IronBerlin iron is cast, black-burnished iron jewellery of Prussian manufacture - created in the context of the Wars of Liberation of 1813 and, over the following decades, become an emblem of patriotic mourning culture.
- Black Enamel (Schwarzemail)Black enamel is a glass frit coloured with manganese oxide and fused in thin layers onto gold or silver - the most expensive variant of Victorian mourning jewellery and the preferred carrier ground for inscriptions.
- Bog OakBog oak is oak timber preserved for thousands of years in raised bog, which turns deep black through interaction with humic acids and which in the 19th century became, above all in Ireland, a vernacular, inexpensive material for mourning jewellery - a patriotically charged counterpart to English Whitby jet.
- French JetFrench jet is a misnomer - not jet at all, but deep black pressed glass which, from the 1860s onwards, conquered the Victorian widow's-mourning-jewellery segment as inexpensive mass-produced ware.
- Garnet (Mourning Garnet)The garnet - above all the dark red pyrope from Bohemia - was in the 19th century the most important red gemstone material of mourning and half-mourning jewellery, above all in the Central European region, with Bohemian garnet jewellery as a jewellery tradition in its own right, peaking in the second half of the century.
- Gold in Mourning JewelleryGold is historically the most dominant carrier material of mourning and memorial jewellery - usually in muted alloys, often contrasted with black enamel or as a restrained gold setting around a dark principal material such as jet, onyx or a plait of hair.
- Horsehair (Crin de Cheval)Horsehair - above all from the manes and tails of slaughtered horses - was in the 18th and 19th centuries an important material for woven and plaited mourning jewellery elements, used by French *cheveliers* and Swedish workshops to imitate and supplement the more expensive hairwork.
- IvoryFrom the 17th to the 19th century ivory was an important material for memento mori carvings, carved mourning pendants and miniature portraits in pendant mounts - today its use is strictly regulated worldwide by the CITES convention on the protection of species, and the market is shifting to historical pieces and substitute materials such as mammoth ivory or tagua nut.
- Jet (Gagate)Jet - German *Gagat* - is a fossil, deep-black material formed from petrified wood which in the nineteenth century became the very epitome of Victorian mourning jewellery.
- OnyxOnyx is a black variety of chalcedony which, in Victorian mourning jewellery of the second stage of mourning, formed the lustrous, polished counterpart to matt jet.
- Silver in Mourning JewelleryIn the 19th century silver was the popular mourning carrier material of the bourgeois middle class and is today the most widespread material of modern memorial jewellery - cheaper than gold, more precise to engrave than stainless steel and with a long symbolic tradition as a material of purity and of memento mori iconography.
- The Pearl in Mourning JewelleryThe pearl is the most important white material in the mourning context - symbol of the tear, of purity and of innocence - and in the 19th century was the preferred gemstone substance above all in half-mourning and final mourning as well as in mourning jewellery for deceased children.
- Vulcanite (Ebonite)Vulcanite is hardened, black-dyed natural rubber - an industrial invention of the 1840s which found wide use in Victorian mourning jewellery as an inexpensive alternative to jet.
- Whitby JetWhitby jet is jet from the North English coastal town of Whitby - by far the most important deposit worldwide in the 19th century and the gold standard of Victorian mourning jewellery.
Jewellery forms
14- Ash PendantThe ash pendant is a modern remembrance pendant with a tightly sealed hollow setting that holds a small quantity of a deceased person's ashes - today the fastest-growing jewellery form in the modern mourning and remembrance market.
- Fingerprint PendantA fingerprint pendant carries the line pattern of a fingerprint, milled or laser-engraved into gold, silver or platinum - today the defining form of modern remembrance jewellery and the technical successor format to the Victorian mourning locket.
- Funerary JewelleryFunerary jewellery is jewellery placed with a deceased person at burial or worn by the bereaved on the day of the funeral - an umbrella term covering very different forms with a tradition thousands of years old and a modern redefinition as a personalised keepsake.
- Mourning BraceletThe mourning bracelet is a remembrance piece worn at the wrist which became popular in the nineteenth century as plaited hairwork or as a jet link bracelet, and which lives on today as a leather bracelet with a relic setting or a fine gold bracelet with a remembrance element.
- Mourning BroochThe mourning brooch is the central women's jewellery form of Victorian mourning wear - a brooch, often the size of a palm, pinned to dress, collar or veil, and today an almost exclusively historical field of collecting.
- Mourning CuffA mourning cuff is a broad bangle worn at the wrist, established in the nineteenth century as a formal mourning accessory of the English and American upper class, and living on today as a wide bracelet with a relic setting or an inscription panel.
- Mourning CufflinksMourning cufflinks are discreet, soberly mounted cufflinks in black, onyx or matt gold which belonged in the nineteenth century to a gentleman's formal mourning toilette, and which live on today as a personalised remembrance set with an inscription, symbol or fingerprint.
- Mourning EarringsMourning earrings are matt black or muted pieces of ear jewellery which in the nineteenth century were an obligatory component of the female mourning toilette, and which live on today as a discreet remembrance variant with a tiny relic setting.
- Mourning LocketThe mourning locket is a pendant worn on a neck chain with an interior compartment - a concealed carrier of hair, photograph or inscription that keeps the memento close to the body and has been, from the eighteenth century to the present, the most important private form of mourning jewellery.
- Mourning NecklaceThe mourning necklace is a chain worn at the neck in black or muted material which, in the second half of the nineteenth century, became the standard daytime wear of the mourning period, and which lives on today as a reduced remembrance variant with a pendant.
- Mourning Ring (Memorial Ring)A mourning ring - also called a memorial ring - is a finger ring that carries the memory of a deceased person, usually in the form of an inscription, an image, a lock of hair or a fingerprint.
- Mourning StickpinThe mourning stickpin is a small pin worn on the lapel or at the knot of a tie which belonged in the nineteenth century to a gentleman's formal mourning toilette - today a discreet remembrance lapel pin with a symbol, initials or a fingerprint element.
- Posy RingA posy ring is a gold ring, in use from the late Middle Ages into the eighteenth century, bearing an inscription engraved on its inner face - a relic in words, worn directly on the finger as a promise of love, friendship or remembrance.
- Reliquary PendantThe reliquary pendant is the religious ancestor of the remembrance locket - a pendant worn at the neck with an interior compartment that originally held the relics of saints and, from the seventeenth century onwards, was secularised into a keepsake of deceased family members.
Symbols & motifs
13- AnchorIn mourning and memorial jewellery the anchor is the classic symbol of *hope* - usually paired with the cross (faith) and the heart (love) as a threefold emblem of the virtues; a constant form in Victorian jewellery, and living on in modern memorial jewellery as a many-layered symbol of steadiness, anchorage and constancy.
- Angels and PuttiIn mourning jewellery, angels and putti form the iconographic bridge between death and redemption - the angel as the soul's companion into the hereafter, the putto as an image of the innocent child's soul. Both motifs are widespread in sentimental and Victorian mourning jewellery, above all in the context of mourning for children.
- ButterflyThe butterfly is the most important modern secular symbol of mourning - an ancient mythological metaphor for the soul (Greek *psyché* means both "butterfly" and "soul") that was marginal in the nineteenth century and has, since the late twentieth, become the dominant alternative symbol of remembrance alongside cross and heart.
- CrossThe cross is the most formative Christian symbol of mourning and remembrance - from the medieval reliquary cross via the Victorian jet cross to the modern memorial pendant; in all its formal variety (Latin cross, Celtic cross, patriarchal cross, cross patté) it always points to death, redemption and resurrection.
- Forget-me-notThe forget-me-not is the German-speaking world's symbol of mourning and remembrance par excellence - a small blue meadow flower whose very name becomes a plea to be remembered, and which has shaped bourgeois mourning jewellery since the Biedermeier.
- Hand with Flower (*Dexiosis* and the Flower Gesture)The hand with flower - a hand emerging from a sleeve, holding a bouquet, a single blossom or a posy of forget-me-nots - is a central sentimental and mourning cipher of Georgian and Biedermeier jewellery, often carrying the sense of being *reached out from the grave* or of a *last greeting of love*.
- HeartThe heart is the third element of the Christian triad of virtues (faith - hope - love) and at the same time the strongest secular symbol of love and affection in mourning and memorial jewellery - from the medieval Sacred Heart via the Georgian heart locket to the modern ash pendant in the shape of a heart.
- HourglassThe hourglass is one of the oldest and most potent memento mori symbols - sand run through as an image of the passing of a lifetime, often given wings (*tempus fugit*, "time flies") and a standard cipher on mourning jewellery from the Baroque into the early nineteenth century.
- Serpent (Ouroboros)The serpent biting its own tail - the ouroboros - is one of the few Baroque memento mori symbols to survive the passage into the Victorian age: an image of eternity that was reinterpreted in the nineteenth century from admonition into a gesture of hope.
- Skull (the Memento Mori Death's Head)The skull is the sharpest and oldest memento mori symbol - a direct iconographic reminder of mortality and transience that became the dominant jewellery form in the Baroque and, after a long bourgeois interval, is present again today in modern memorial and fashion symbolism.
- TearThe tear - as a shaped teardrop pendant, as a drop-shaped pearl or as a painted tear on a miniature portrait - is one of the most direct mourning symbols of all; it joins bodily reality (the drop actually wept) to symbolic condensation, and appears in jewellery from the Baroque memento mori to the modern teardrop ash pendant.
- UrnThe urn is the longest-lived mourning symbol of the European jewellery tradition - an antiquising vessel form that, since the late eighteenth century, has represented the ashes and thus, metonymically, the deceased person themselves.
- Weeping WillowThe weeping willow is the most formative botanical mourning symbol of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - born in the English landscape garden of the Enlightenment, adopted by sentimentalism as an image of silent sorrow, and become in Victorian mourning iconography the dominant mourning scene on pendants, miniatures and grave stelae.
Techniques & craft
12- Celluloid (Mourning-Jewellery Imitation)Celluloid is the first industrially produced plastic in history (1869) and became, in the late nineteenth century, the cheap imitation of jet, ivory and amber in the mass mourning jewellery of the late Victorian middle and working classes - the first “democratisation” of mourning jewellery and, at the same time, the beginning of the decline of the noble mourning materials.
- Engraving and InscriptionsEngraving is the oldest personalisation technique in memorial jewellery - from the Baroque memento mori ring to modern laser micro-engraving, which today inscribes initials, dates of death and even photographed handwriting into metal.
- GuillochéGuilloché is a mechanical engraving technique in which overlapping geometric line patterns (waves, spirals, hatchings) are cut into metal - usually as a ground for translucent enamel. A classic jewellery technique since the eighteenth century, it shapes high-quality mourning and sentimental lockets.
- HairworkHairwork is the collective term for all techniques in which human hair becomes the carrier material of a piece of jewellery - from a single lock beneath rock crystal to finely plaited hair weaving in the Victorian showpiece manner.
- Laser EngravingLaser engraving is the most important modern engraving technique in memorial jewellery: a focused laser beam removes material from the jewellery surface with precision and leaves a permanent mark accurate to a fraction of a millimetre - for names, dates of death, handwriting, fingerprint lines or QR codes.
- Lovers' EyeA lover's eye is a painted miniature of an eye on ivory, set into a brooch or pendant - an English special form of sentimental jewellery in which the identifying face is absent and only the eye remains.
- Micromosaic (Micromosaico)The micromosaic is a mosaic technique perfected in Rome and Venice, in which tiny glass tesserae (often smaller than 1 mm) are assembled into detailed miniature pictures - in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a high-grade material for mourning and souvenir pendants bearing neoclassical mourning scenes, weeping willows, urns or memorial inscriptions.
- Miniature Painting on IvoryMiniature painting on ivory was the leading technique of personal portrait jewellery in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - the finest watercolour work on ivory plaques 1 to 5 cm across, set in gold mounts and worn as a pendant, brooch or bracelet.
- Niello (Black Inlay Technique)Niello is an ancient jewellery-finishing technique in which engraved lines on silver or gold are filled with a black sulphur-metal alloy - the result is a deep dark line drawing on a light ground, used in memento mori jewellery and in Victorian mourning jewellery as a cheaper alternative to black enamel.
- Pinchbeck (Gold-Imitation Alloy)Pinchbeck is a copper-zinc alloy of the early eighteenth century, developed by the London clockmaker Christopher Pinchbeck - deceptively similar to gold in appearance, considerably cheaper, and in Georgian sentimental jewellery the dominant material of middle-class mourning and memorial pieces.
- Sepia Hair PaintingSepia hair painting combines two sentimental techniques: chopped human hair is worked with sepia ink into a pigment mixture and used as the medium for tiny mourning miniatures set beneath rock crystal.
- Stuart CrystalStuart crystal is an English memento mori jewellery technique of the late seventeenth century: a flat rock-crystal cabochon is set over a miniature painting with a memento mori motif (skull, initials, date of death) - the technique dominated English mourning jewellery of the Stuart and early Hanoverian periods.
People & cultural history
8- George IV (1762–1830)George IV, Prince Regent from 1811 and King of England from 1820 to 1830, was a pronounced lover of sentimental jewellery and as such shaped the transitional phase in jewellery history between the Georgian and the Victorian mourning traditions - the lover's-eye fashion in particular is directly connected to his personal commission of 1785.
- Mourning Rituals in the German-Speaking WorldGerman-speaking mourning rituals differ perceptibly from the English court-mourning tradition - shaped by confessional division (Catholic / Protestant), middle-class sensibility, Biedermeier domesticity and an independent culture of memorial jewellery which carried different emphases in Vienna, Berlin and Munich according to region.
- Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1819–1861)Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, was in his lifetime a central cultural and political figure of the English court - his early death on 14 December 1861 set off his wife's forty years of widow's mourning and thereby shaped the whole Victorian mourning-jewellery system more lastingly than any other single death of the nineteenth century.
- Queen Victoria (1819–1901)Queen Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom from 1837 to 1901, became through her forty years of widow's mourning after the death of Prince Albert (1861) the central style-setting figure of the Victorian mourning-jewellery system - her personal practice of mourning shaped an entire age of European mourning culture.
- The Berlin Iron ManufactoriesThe Prussian royal iron foundries in Berlin, Gleiwitz and Sayn made fine jewellery of blackened cast iron between 1804 and around 1870 - at first as a patriotic exchange material during the Wars of Liberation (*Gold gab ich für Eisen*, "I gave gold for iron"), later as an established mourning and memorial line of the Biedermeier period.
- The Middle Classes and Mourning Jewellery in the Nineteenth CenturyThe rising middle classes of the nineteenth century were the principal bearers and principal consumers of the era's mourning and memorial jewellery - a social stratum that took over the aristocratic model of court mourning, gave it symbols and materials of its own, and in the course of industrialisation turned it into a mass market.
- Tudor Mourning and Stuart Bequest RingsThe Tudor and Stuart era in England (1485–1714) is the birth period of the modern mourning-jewellery system - from the memento mori ring of Henry VIII's day, through the *funeral ring* bequests of the Elizabethan aristocracy, to the Stuart mourning ring following the execution of Charles I (1649) and the death of Charles II (1685).
- Whitby - Jet Workshops on the Yorkshire CoastWhitby is the small harbour town on the north-east English Yorkshire coast whose jet deposits and workshops supplied the Victorian mourning-jewellery system with its most important material foundation in the nineteenth century - at the peak around 1870, more than 1,500 cutters and carvers there worked for the global mourning market.
Modern memorial jewellery
11- 3D Printing and Memorial ObjectsIn modern memorial culture, 3D printing (additive manufacturing) allows unique bodily traces to be reproduced directly - fingerprints, handprints, face casts, footprints - as a piece of jewellery or a memorial object; since around 2010 the technology has transformed the production of personalised memorial jewellery.
- Ash JewelleryAsh jewellery is a modern memorial piece in which a small quantity of cremation ashes is permanently enclosed - usually in a hollow setting with a rock-crystal window, or embedded in synthetic resin.
- Digital Remembrance (QR Code, NFC, AR)Digital remembrance links a classical memorial object (a piece of jewellery, a headstone, an urn) to content retrievable digitally - typically via a QR code, an NFC chip or an augmented-reality marker. Across that bridge, photographs, videos, texts and voice messages of the person who has died can be made permanently accessible.
- Fingerprint JewelleryFingerprint jewellery carries the individual ridge pattern of a specific person - as a fine laser engraving, in relief or set beneath a cabochon - and so turns a biometric feature into a deeply personal memorial motif.
- Hair Pendant (Modern Memorial Jewellery)The modern hair pendant carries a lock of the person remembered in a tightly sealed hollow setting at the throat - the direct technical continuation of the Victorian hairwork tradition, today made with modern workshop techniques and usually combined with a laser engraving or inscription on the outer face.
- Memorial DiamondThe memorial diamond is a synthetically grown diamond cultivated from the carbon of cremation ashes or a lock of the deceased person's hair - the most technically demanding and most durable keepsake of the present day.
- Memorial Glass (Ashes in Glass)In memorial glass, a small quantity of the deceased person's ashes is worked into molten glass and formed into a memorial object - typically a pendant, bead, marble, sculpture or vase. Within the transparent or coloured glass the ashes form characteristic cloud, bubble or star patterns, making the link to the person remembered visible.
- Memorial Jewellery for Stillbirth and Infant LossJewellery for stillbirth and infant loss is memorial jewellery for children who died before, during or shortly after birth. It works with the often very limited bodily traces (footprint, lock of hair, handprint) and forms a distinct and especially sensitive field.
- Memorial TattooThe memorial tattoo is an inscription in the skin in memory of a person who has died; one particular variant is the *ash tattoo* or *morbid ink tattoo*, in which a small quantity of the deceased person's sterilised ashes is mixed into the tattoo pigment - a modern form of remembrance carried on the body itself, outside the classical jewellery tradition.
- Personalisation Through Engraving (Handwriting, Initials, Dates)Modern laser engraving ties a piece of jewellery precisely to one particular person - through initials, dates of death, photographed handwriting or fingerprint ridges - and is today the most common personalisation technique in memorial jewellery.
- Pet Memorial JewelleryPet memorial jewellery transfers the personalisation techniques of human memorial jewellery to dogs, cats, horses and other companion animals - paw print, whisker, lock of fur or ashes as the link to an animal that has died.
Practice & law
5- Burial Laws and the Ashes of the Deceased (Germany, Austria, Switzerland)In Germany, ashes are largely subject to mandatory cemetery burial (*Friedhofszwang*); in Austria practice is more liberal and varies by state; in Switzerland it is largely unrestricted. This has concrete consequences for ash jewellery and memorial diamonds; the legal position is country-specific and still changing.
- Friedhofszwang - Mandatory Cemetery Burial (Germany)*Friedhofszwang* is the duty, in force in Germany, to bury mortal remains - including ashes from a cremation - only in an approved cemetery or in a state-approved alternative form of burial. It sets the legal limits on what is possible with ashes in the context of mourning and memorial jewellery.
- Grief Timeline - Jewellery and Memorial PiecesWhen does which step in the grieving process make sense - from the immediate loss, through the funeral, to later memorial projects? This guide sets out the typical grief timeline as it relates to decisions about jewellery and remembrance, and helps you find the right moment for each form of memorial piece.
- Inheriting Jewellery - A Practical GuideJewellery is among the most emotionally charged of all inherited possessions - and at the same time one of the most frequent sources of conflict among co-heirs. This guide covers the key legal, practical and personal questions around inheriting jewellery under German law, with particular reference to mourning and memorial pieces.
- Keeping Cremation Ashes - A Practical GuideAnyone wishing to keep a deceased person's ashes for memorial jewellery, a memorial tattoo or another personal form of remembrance faces legal, practical and ethical questions. This guide explains the typical steps, the quantities involved, the available storage options and the pitfalls to watch for.
Questions about this entry
- What distinguishes mourning jewellery from memorial jewellery?
Mourning jewellery announces outwardly that the wearer is currently in mourning - in the 19th century it formed part of a strictly codified mourning wardrobe. Memorial jewellery, by contrast, is tied to one specific person and is often worn for decades after the death. In practice the two terms overlap frequently.
- Which materials count as typical?
Deep matte black was obligatory: jet from Whitby, onyx, black agate, black enamel on gold, and in Prussia cast Berlin iron. Alongside these came hair - as a lock, a plait or a painting medium - and, from around 1900, increasingly gold with set photographs.
- Is mourning jewellery still worn today?
Formal court mourning is over, but the idea of deliberately putting on a piece of jewellery after a death is very much alive - today usually personalised: a fingerprint in gold, an inscription, a lock of hair under rock crystal, a portion of ashes or a memorial diamond. Black is no longer a requirement.
- Which era shapes our image of it most strongly?
The Victorian 19th century. Queen Victoria's forty years of mourning for Prince Albert did not invent black jewellery, but it turned it into a visible mass practice - with its own manufactories, trade routes and stylistic canon.
- Does mourning jewellery exist only in Europe?
No. In Mexico personalised jewellery belongs to the cult of Día de los Muertos; in West Africa beads bearing inscriptions form part of burial tradition; in East Asia locks of hair are worn in bento pendants. The European variant is the best documented, but not the only one.
Further reading
- Mourning Jewellery - V&A
- The Power of Adornment: Personal Mourning Jewellery - Sarah Nehama (2012)
- Death Becomes Her - A Century of Mourning Attire - Jessica Regan (2014)
- Schmuck der Trauer - Wilhelm Salewski (1958)
Related entries
- Core conceptsMemorial Jewellery
Memorial jewellery is jewellery that deliberately binds itself to one particular person - through an inscription, a photograph, hair, ashes or, the defining medium today, a digitally captured fingerprint.
- Core conceptsMemento mori
Memento mori is the Christian-Stoic exhortation to be mindful of one's own death - and at the same time the iconographic soil from which European mourning jewellery of the 17th century grew.
- Core conceptsWidow's Jewellery
Widow's jewellery is the graduated mourning jewellery worn by widows in the 19th century according to a strictly codified plan of court mourning - from deep matte black to half-mourning lilac, each phase with its own materials and its own formal language.
- Core conceptsSentimental Jewellery
Sentimental jewellery is the jewellery of the age of sensibility between 1760 and 1840 - pieces in which love, friendship and grief share the same imagery, and in which hair, miniature painting and personal inscriptions first become the load-bearing form.
- MaterialsJet (Gagate)
Jet - German *Gagat* - is a fossil, deep-black material formed from petrified wood which in the nineteenth century became the very epitome of Victorian mourning jewellery.
- Jewellery formsMourning Ring (Memorial Ring)
A mourning ring - also called a memorial ring - is a finger ring that carries the memory of a deceased person, usually in the form of an inscription, an image, a lock of hair or a fingerprint.
- Modern memorial jewelleryFingerprint Jewellery
Fingerprint jewellery carries the individual ridge pattern of a specific person - as a fine laser engraving, in relief or set beneath a cabochon - and so turns a biometric feature into a deeply personal memorial motif.
- PeriodsThe Victorian Era (1837–1901)
The Victorian era is the heyday of mourning jewellery - a period of more than sixty years in which court mourning codes, industrial mass production, new materials (jet, vulcanite, Berlin iron) and Queen Victoria's personal widowhood combined to produce a system of public and private mourning visibility without precedent in European history.
- PeriodsThe Georgian Era (1714–1837)
The Georgian era spans the reigns of the four kings George I to George IV and of William IV in Britain. In mourning jewellery it is the epoch in which sentimental jewellery was invented - sepia hair painting, the lover's eye, the miniature portrait on ivory, and the posy ring in transition to the memento mori ring.
- Techniques & craftHairwork
Hairwork is the collective term for all techniques in which human hair becomes the carrier material of a piece of jewellery - from a single lock beneath rock crystal to finely plaited hair weaving in the Victorian showpiece manner.
- Symbols & motifsUrn
The urn is the longest-lived mourning symbol of the European jewellery tradition - an antiquising vessel form that, since the late eighteenth century, has represented the ashes and thus, metonymically, the deceased person themselves.
- Symbols & motifsWeeping Willow
The weeping willow is the most formative botanical mourning symbol of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - born in the English landscape garden of the Enlightenment, adopted by sentimentalism as an image of silent sorrow, and become in Victorian mourning iconography the dominant mourning scene on pendants, miniatures and grave stelae.
- Modern memorial jewelleryAsh Jewellery
Ash jewellery is a modern memorial piece in which a small quantity of cremation ashes is permanently enclosed - usually in a hollow setting with a rock-crystal window, or embedded in synthetic resin.
- Modern memorial jewelleryMemorial Diamond
The memorial diamond is a synthetically grown diamond cultivated from the carbon of cremation ashes or a lock of the deceased person's hair - the most technically demanding and most durable keepsake of the present day.