When did the weeping willow become a mourning symbol?

Its symbolic charge is old (Psalm 137), but its use specifically in jewellery begins in the late eighteenth century. With the rise of the English landscape garden, weeping willows were deliberately planted beside ponds and in burial grounds - as a pictorial embodiment of the "melancholy landscape". This garden iconography was taken over into sentimental jewellery (see Sentimental Jewellery) - small miniature paintings show typical mourning scenes with weeping willow, urn, female mourning figure and grave stele.

What is the typical weeping willow scene shown in jewellery?

The classic weeping willow scene was standardised by English and American miniature painters of the late eighteenth century. It shows: a weeping willow in the middle ground, its branches hanging to the ground; a female mourning figure in a long white robe, leaning against the willow or a grave column; an urn or a gravestone with an inscription; a dog at her feet (a symbol of fidelity); and in the background a temple or a ruin. The scene was painted in hundreds of variants, often as a miniature on an ivory plaque set into the hollow of a mourning pendant (see Mourning Locket).

Is the symbol still alive today?

In reduced form. The explicit weeping willow is rare in the modern jewellery market - the visual language of Victorian sentimentalism often strikes today's mourners as old-fashioned. What remains: stylised willow motifs on gravestones, occasional engravings on memorial pendants, and antique jewels as collectors' items. In tattooing the weeping willow is enjoying a second career - as a deliberately gentle, melancholy memorial tattoo referring to a deceased person.

Weeping 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.

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