Sepia Hair Painting
Sepia 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.
Written by Dr. Helene Vasall
Sepia hair painting is one of the strangest and most densely allusive products of sentimental jewellery practice. It solves a specific problem of the late Enlightenment and the early age of sensibility: how can a piece of jewellery both show the absent person and contain them? A painted portrait shows but contains nothing; a lock beneath rock crystal contains but shows nothing. Sepia hair painting does both at once - it paints with the very substance it depicts.
Technique
Production followed a fixed sequence, documented in several workshop manuals of the early nineteenth century:
- Preparing the hair. The strand of hair is washed, degreased and cut into small pieces. On a stone slab (usually agate or marble) the hair is ground with a burnisher until a fine, dark powder results.
- Mixing the pigment. The hair powder is mixed with sepia ink and gum arabic as a binder into a watercolour-like paint. Some workshops added further sepia; others worked with pure hair ink.
- Choosing the support. The standard support is a thinly ground plaque of ivory, usually round (1.5 to 2.5 cm in diameter), occasionally oval. Ivory has a warm white ground tone that gives sepia ink a particular depth.
- Painting. The motif is applied in several layers with the finest brushes (often only one to three hairs in the brush). A typical miniature took two to four sittings.
- Mounting. The finished plaque is set into a gold mount with a rock-crystal cabochon or a pane of glass. The reverse often contains a second hollow setting holding an unground strand of the same person's hair.
The technique is extraordinarily laborious. A single miniature could cost a mid-ranking official a month's wages.
Iconography
The pictorial language is remarkably stable across the whole of its heyday. Three compositions dominate.
Weeping willow over an urn. The most common composition. A stylised weeping willow hangs over an antique-style stone urn; a mourning woman in classical dress kneels or stands before it. In the background there is sometimes a church, a mausoleum or a fallen column stump. Inscriptions on the urn give initials and a date of death.
Mourner at a grave. A variant with a stronger personal reference. The mourner - sometimes with a recognisable resemblance to a portrait - sits on a stone bench beside the grave; to the right or left a weeping willow, in the background a sentimental landscape.
Anchor, heart and hand. A symbolic condensation without a figurative scene. An anchor as the symbol of hope, a flaming heart, a hand holding a bunch of forget-me-nots. Also common as a carrier of inscriptions - Hope, Souvenir, À jamais.
What does not appear: drastic memento mori symbolism (skull, hourglass). Sepia hair painting is a gentle mourning iconography that cultivates the pathos of sensibility without repeating the menace of the Baroque.
Workshops and market conditions
The most important workshops were in London (several on the Strand and in Bath), in Paris (Forrer and its competitors) and in the German-speaking residence cities. Pieces were offered as patterns - a workshop typically kept two to four dozen standard compositions from which the customer could choose. Personalisation was limited to the inscription and occasionally to the figure of the mourner.
Mail order was the norm. The customer sent in a strand of hair together with an order specifying the chosen motif and the desired inscription; the workshop returned the finished piece after eight to fourteen weeks. The delivery time was part of the process of grieving - the piece often arrived only once the first, acute grief had subsided.
Decline
Sepia hair painting disappeared rapidly after 1830. Three factors combined:
- The daguerreotype (from 1839) and, shortly afterwards, photography made the portrait image cheap and realistic. A daguerreotype cost a fraction of a sepia miniature and showed the person as they really looked.
- The Victorian change of taste pushed delicate Georgian sentimentality into the background. Victorian mourning worked with jet, Berlin iron and black enamel - materials, not pictures.
- The technique itself was too fragile. The pigments faded quickly, the ivory warped, and pieces looked markedly weaker after only a generation.
By 1860 the genre was practically extinct. Later imitations (around 1900, for the collectors' market) can be recognised by their coarser painting technique and their synthetic binders.
Conservation
Sepia hair paintings are among the most fragile objects in sentimental jewellery. Recommendations for storage:
- UV protection. Never direct sunlight; store preferably in a closed cabinet or a dark case.
- Stable climate. Fluctuating humidity warps the ivory and can lead to cracks.
- No mechanical cleaning. Even a soft cloth can abrade pigment. Where soiling is visible, consult a specialist conservator.
- Check the rock-crystal cover. Loose mounts should be resealed to prevent the ingress of dust and moisture.
Sepia hair painting today
There is no active contemporary practice. The technique is museum knowledge - a very few conservators worldwide have mastered it. It is not being revived in modern memorial jewellery; the aesthetic logic of the period (gentle images of pathos with a botanical iconography) has no contemporary point of connection. What has remained is the idea - a keepsake that contains the substance of the person remembered. That thought lives on in today's ash pendants and memorial diamonds.
Questions about this entry
- Why was hair used as a pigment?
The sentimental logic of the late eighteenth century demanded that a keepsake should contain the substance of the person remembered. A pure ink miniature would have been a picture; with hair pigment it became a referring picture. The technique thus solves a concrete aesthetic problem of its age.
- How was the hair processed?
The strand of hair was ground to a fine powder on a stone slab with an agate burnisher, mixed with sepia ink and gum arabic as a binder and bound into something resembling a watercolour. The painting was done with the finest brushes on a thin ivory plaque (1.5 to 2.5 cm in diameter).
- How can sepia hair painting be recognised?
Under a strong lens the pigment shows a characteristic fibrous structure - fine, sometimes still discernible traces of hair within the colour. Pure sepia miniatures without hair are smoother. On well-preserved pieces the fibrous structure is most easily seen in the dark areas of the image.
- Can damaged pieces be restored?
Hardly. The sepia pigments are light-sensitive and fade irreversibly; the ivory plaque warps in humidity. Proper conservation is limited to halting the decay (UV protection, stabilising the climate) rather than restoring the piece. Most surviving examples are markedly paler than they originally were.
Further reading
- Sentimental Jewellery - Shire Library - Ann Louise Luthi (2007)
- Hair Jewellery - Mourning and Sentimental - Helen Sheumaker (2008)
- Mourning Miniatures - Yale Center for British Art
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 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.
- 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.
- Techniques & craftMiniature Painting on Ivory
Miniature 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.
- Techniques & craftLovers' Eye
A 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.
- 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.
- 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 & 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.
- 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.