Forget-me-not
The 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.
Written by Dr. Helene Vasall
The forget-me-not is the specifically German-speaking mourning symbol. While the urn and the weeping willow come from the classical English and French tradition, the forget-me-not comes from the Central European pictorial crafts of the Biedermeier - and survives there as a standard keepsake motif well into the twentieth century.
Etymology and world of meaning
The German name is a direct plea: vergiss mein nicht, "forget me not". It is attested from the fifteenth century for the small blue meadow flower Myosotis; the folk-etymological story tells of a medieval knight who picks a posy for his beloved on a riverbank, falls in, and as he sinks throws her the flowers with the words forget me not. The story has no literary source, but it circulates in the nineteenth century in countless friendship-album entries and becomes there the cultural origin of the symbolism.
The self-reference matters: the name is the symbolism. Unlike the urn, the anchor or the weeping willow, whose meanings are mediated through allegory and religious texts, the forget-me-not carries its message already in its word.
Entry into the jewellery context
In the Biedermeier the motif becomes productive for several pictorial genres at once:
- Friendship-album entries - the albums of the 1820s to 1860s contain thousands of small forget-me-not watercolours, often with a signature and a date.
- Love correspondence - letters to a beloved are furnished with pressed forget-me-not blossoms or illustrated with small watercolour vignettes.
- Mourning correspondence - letters of condolence take up the motif as a gentler counterpart to the weeping willow.
- Mourning jewellery - from the 1830s onwards as a painted, engraved or enamelled element in pendants, brooches and lockets.
In the English-speaking world the plant appears in parallel as the forget-me-not - above all in the sentimental jewellery of the late Regency and the early Victorian period. Its iconographic function is identical.
Composition
The forget-me-not appears in several typical constellations:
Solitary. A single blossom, often with a stem and one or two leaves, as an engraved or painted vignette. Frequently on the reverse of lockets or on the inner faces of mourning rings.
A posy in a hand. An open hand holds a small posy of forget-me-nots. A variant of the hand with flower image type, often on mourning brooches (see Hand with Flower (Dexiosis and the Flower Gesture)).
Wreath or garland. Sprays of forget-me-not bound into a wreath, frequently laid around a central pictorial element (initials, a date of death, a miniature). A classic Biedermeier motif.
Micromosaic. Floral images assembled from tiny rods of glass, above all in the Italian micromosaic of the Belle Époque. These pieces are technically impressive and command high prices at collectors' auctions today.
In stone painting - as a small blue detail in cabochon pictures on rock crystal or glass.
Jewellery contexts
- Biedermeier lockets - the forget-me-not as a painted motif on the front (see Mourning Locket)
- Mourning brooches with an enamel forget-me-not
- Mourning rings with the motif engraved inside the hoop and a date of death beneath
- Pendants with a rock crystal cabochon over a painted forget-me-not vignette
- Micromosaic jewellery of the Belle Époque, above all from Rome and Florence
- Vernacular mourning pieces - on painted wooden crosses, wax pictures and memorial plates
In German folk art of the nineteenth century the forget-me-not is one of the most frequently painted pictorial elements; it passes from high culture into rural mourning practice and stays alive there far longer than academic mourning iconography.
A German symbol with a political turn
One separate history is the use of the forget-me-not as a secret symbol in German Freemasonry from 1934. When the lodges were dissolved under National Socialism, Freemasons wore a small blue forget-me-not lapel pin as a discreet sign of recognition - the plant itself aroused no suspicion. The tradition lives on in some German lodges to this day and is among the more interesting historical repurposings of the symbol.
This politicisation does not touch the mourning jewellery tradition directly, but it is relevant to the classification of twentieth-century pieces: a forget-me-not jewel of the 1930s to 1950s may be a lodge insignia rather than a mourning piece.
Decline in mourning jewellery
With the end of sentimentalism around 1900 the forget-me-not disappears from high-quality jewellery. In folk art and souvenirs it remains alive - the memorial kitsch of the post-war boom years takes up the motif as a matter of routine. In serious contemporary mourning jewellery it has practically vanished; the iconography has shifted to inscription, date and fingerprint.
Today
In modern memorial jewellery the forget-me-not plays no part as a pictorial motif. In some craft workshops it lives on as a deliberate nod to the Biedermeier tradition - in hand-engraved pendants, for instance, or in modern micromosaic pieces. As a current symbol of contemporary memorial jewellery, however, it is extinguished.
What remains is the gesture: the plea not to be forgotten. That gesture lives on in every memorial piece made today - the fingerprint pendant is structurally a modern forget-me-not: a small, everyday sign that holds a person in remembrance through their own substance.
Questions about this entry
- Why is the forget-me-not so closely bound to mourning?
The name itself is a plea - forget me not. In the Biedermeier the plant becomes the standard keepsake: friendship albums, correspondences, love letters and mourning jewellery all work with the motif. The little blue blossom becomes the iconographic condensation of the whole gesture - "remember me". Its transfer to mourning is only a small extension of that basic meaning.
- In which jewellery forms does the motif appear?
Frequently as a painted element in sepia miniatures, as an engraved pictorial cipher on gold mounts, as a small enamel detail on mourning brooches, as part of the hand-with-bouquet motif (see Hand with Flower (Dexiosis and the Flower Gesture)), as a stone mosaic in Belle Époque micromosaic work, and as a pendant motif in Biedermeier lockets.
- Does the forget-me-not have an international tradition?
Yes, with clear local emphases. In the German-speaking countries and in England (forget-me-not) the motif is central. In French sentimental jewellery it is less formative; there the hand with flowers or the fleur de pensée (pansy - a play on pensée, "thought") dominates. In the United States the tradition is taken over directly from Victorian England.
- Is the motif still current today?
In folk art, souvenir jewellery and collectors' reproductions, yes. In modern memorial jewellery it no longer plays a part as a pictorial motif. The idea of pleading to be remembered is unbroken, however - today's fingerprint jewellery is structurally a modern forget-me-not.
Further reading
- Sprache der Blumen - Symbolik im Biedermeier - Marina Heilmeyer (2006)
- Sentimental Jewellery - Shire Library - Ann Louise Luthi (2007)
- Hair Jewellery - Mourning and Sentimental - Helen Sheumaker (2008)
Related entries
- 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.
- Core conceptsMourning 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Symbols & motifsHand 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*.
- Jewellery formsMourning Locket
The 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.
- PeriodsBiedermeier (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.
- People & cultural historyThe Middle Classes and Mourning Jewellery in the Nineteenth Century
The 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.