Hairwork of the nineteenth century

Magazine Antiques, March, 2001 by Irene Guggenheim Navarro

The nineteenth century saw an explosion in the popularity of hairwork in Europe and the United States. Indeed, most surviving examples originate from this period. [1] Today, nineteenth-century hair jewelry is invariably associated with mourning, and, while much was made and worn for that purpose, much was also made and exchanged to mark happier circumstances, such as an engagement, or friendship. Ultimately, it was produced purely as a fashion accessory.

One social historian has observed that the Industrial Revolution brought about an "emotional revolution as well," [2] noting that in the eighteenth century emotions such as grief were expressed communally and thus were diffused amongst members of a church or community. The stresses and strains of the industrial nineteenth century brought about a spiritual and emotional retreat to the soothing comforts of hearth and family and a tendency to escape from the harsher realities. Eighteenth-century sentiment was replaced by nineteenth-century sentimentality, as evoked in the following popular verse: "If I should from this world/Depart you'd have a bit of my/Hair my hand and heart if we/Could no more each other see/You could still remember me." [3]

Sentimental hair jewelry was worn by members of all classes, from commoners to royalty. Napoleon I (r. 1804-1815 had a watch chain made of the Empress Marie Louise's (r. 1810-1815) hair. England's George IV (r. 1820-1830) was a great giver and receiver of hair tokens, but the greatest patron of, and influence on, the craft was Queen Victoria (r. 1837-1901). She was given several hair bracelets on the occasion of her sixteenth birthday, which may have established her lifelong inclination to offer and accept items of hair jewelry. When the Empress Eugenie (r. 1853-1871) and her husband, Napoleon III (r. 1852-1871), traveled to England on a state visit in 1855, Queen Victoria wrote in her journal on April 20 that Eugenie "was touched to tears when I gave her a bracelet with my hair." [4]

From the time of her engagement to Prince Albert (1819-1861) in 1839, Victoria always wore a lock of his hair in a locket, brooch, or bracelet, and his untimely death in 1861 spurred the development and popularity of hair jewelry. The queen's intense and intractable grief launched her, and thus the rest of England, into a seemingly endless mourning period of forty years, which in its excess eventually made mourning fashionable. Hair jewelry, one of the few acceptable decorative accessories in the strictly prescribed mourning dress toilette, became all the rage. An 1858 issue of the New belle assemblee, a popular English fashion paper, contained a gushing review of the work of the eminent nineteenth-century French hair artisan Gabriel Lemonnier (d. c. 1882):

The sentimental jewellery of Limonnier [sic] is of another character from what all the world is acquainted with, and which gives the locket, or brooch, or ring, in which some beloved tress or precious curl is enshrined, the appearance of having been designed from a monuary tablet. Have we not all met ladies wearing as a brooch, by way of loving remembrance, a tomb between two willow trees formed of the hair of the individual for whom their crape was worn, and which from its very nature must be laid aside with it? Our artist converts the relic into an ornament for all times and places-expands it into a broad ribbon as a bracelet and fastens it with a forget-me-not in turquoises and brilliants [see Pls. III, VI, Fig. 1], weaves it into chains for the neck, the flacon, or the fan; makes it into a medallion of leaves and flowers; and of these last the most beautiful specimens I have seen have been formed of the saintly white hair of age. This he converts into orange-flowers, white roses, chrysanthemums and most c harming of all, clusters of lily-of-the-valley. [5]

England's involvement in constant warfare during Victoria's reign fueled the production of hair jewelry. The Indian Mutiny (1857) and Crimean War (in which England fought from 1854 to 1856), along with a series of endless minor skirmishes, took heavy tolls on England's male population and put many a wife, mother, sister, and friend into mourning. Increasingly the mourning toilette included a piece of memorial jewelry, often fashioned from a lock of the deceased soldier's hair. In the United States, the Civil War gave the same impetus to the art of hairwork, particularly memorial lockets and brooches. The brooch in Plate II, however, memorializes not a heroic death in battle but an ignominious one steeped in tragedy It was made for Martha Williams Carter (see Pls. XHa, XIIb), a great-great-granddaughter of Martha Washington and a cousin of Robert E. Lee (1807-1870), in memory of her young brother William Orton Williams. He and his cousin Walter Gibson Peter (1842-1863) were the first, and possibly the only Co nfederate officers hanged as spies. Orton's blond hair; worked into a cross, rests atop a field of his sister's brown hair. A hairwork and gold anchor, symbolizing hope, is suspended from the brooch, the back of which is engraved with both their names. Commemorative pieces canonizing the memories of Civil War generals and notables were farther by-products of the conflict, particularly in the South, where seemingly endless quantities of brooches and lockets enshrining the hair of Jefferson Davis (1808-1889) and Robert E. Lee survive. An extraordinary example of this type of hairwork is the floral spray pictured in Plate VIII. Each of the fourteen flowers is made from the hair of a different Civil War notable, including Davis and Lee, as well as Generals Jeb Stuart (1833-1864) and Turner Ashby (1828-1862).