Forest Home Cemetery Overview
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  • History of Forest Home Cemetery
    • Native Americans
    • Chapel
    • Bridge over the Des Plaines River
    • Eisenhower Expressway
  • Gravestones and Monuments
    • Gravestone Symbols
    • Unique Gravestone Monuments >
      • White Bronze
      • Rustic Gravestones
      • Photo-ceramic
      • Tiffany Designed Monuments
      • Druids
      • International Organization of Odd Fellows (IOOF)
    • Mausoleum
    • Ashes Scattered and Interred
    • Degradation and Theft
    • Original Deeds and Bookkeeping
  • Labor Activists
    • Haymarket Monument >
      • The Haymarket Affair
      • Haymarket Time Capsule
      • George Engel
      • Samuel Fielden
      • Louis Lingg
      • Adolph Fischer
      • Albert Parsons
      • Michael Schwab
      • August Spies
      • Oscar Neebe
    • Radical Row >
      • Eddie Balchowsky
      • Voltarine de Cleyre
      • Eugene Dennis
      • Raya Dunayevskaya
      • Joseph Dietzgen
      • William Z. Foster
      • Emma Goldmen
      • Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
      • Ben Reitman
      • Lucy Parsons
      • Franklin Rosemont
      • Ann Sosnovsky Winokur
    • Labor and Political Burials >
      • Joe Mariani
      • Cigar Makers' International
      • International Alliance of Bill Posters and Billers of America
  • People of Interest Buried in Cemetery
    • Ashbel Steele
    • Austin Family
    • Philander Barclay
    • Edwin Oscar Gale
    • Sophy and Charles Drechsler
    • Fedinand Haase
    • Doris Humphrey
    • Flora Gill
    • Dr. Clarence and Grace Hemingway
    • Dr. Frank and Phyllis Oreland
    • Augustin and Elizabeth Porter
    • Edward Hand and Lillie Morey Pitkin
    • Martha Louise Rayne
    • Origen White Herrick
    • Dr Thomas Roberts Hurlbut
    • Joseph and Betty Kettlestrings
    • Roos Family
    • James Fletcher Skinner
    • Billy Sunday
    • Adolph Westphal
  • Ethnic and Other Groupings
    • African American
    • Dutch
    • Hispanic
    • Roma (Gypsy)
    • Children
    • Military
  • Disaster Victims
    • Eastland ship disaster
    • Iroquois Theatre Fire
    • Smallpox Epidemic
    • St. Valentine's Day Massacre
  • Cemetery Tours
  • Addtional Resources
    • Forest Park Review articles

Photo-ceramic

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Memorial portraiture is an ancient art, but before photography only the rich could afford to commission sculptures or paintings of themselves. Photography made portraiture available to ordinary people for the first time in history.

Americans have been attaching photographs to tombstones since the era of the daguerreotype, a process in which light was exposed to silver-coated metallic plates. But enamel photographs proved far more durable. In 1854 two French inventors patented a method for fixing a photographic image on enamel or porcelain by firing it in a kiln. These “enamels” were used for home viewing well into the 20th century, when the more convenient paper photos replaced them. The custom of attaching ceramic photos to tombstones spread throughout Southern and Eastern Europe and Latin America. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Italian and Jewish immigrants brought this practice to the United States. “Ceramic photo portraits . . . represent the first period in the history of gravestone manufacture in the United States when intense personalization became available—and affordable—on a large-scale basis,” says Richard E. Meyer, a professor at Western Oregon State College who has studied American cemeteries for more than 25 years. During the first decade of the 1900s, Sears-Roebuck advertised: “Imperishable Limoges porcelain portraits preserve the features of the deceased . . .” At “$11.20 for a photograph set in marble, $15.75 for one set in granite,” these portraits “competed with the cost of many burial plots.” But the prices were cheap compared to the cost of statuary.

Artisans are still manufacturing enamel photographs, but the process has changed significantly. Early 20th-century craftspeople used chlorides or nitrates of gold, platinum, palladium, and iridium—stable metals that resisted degeneration from heat, sunlight, and other chemicals and gave the photographs a sepia tone. These portraits could last more than 100 years. Contemporary artisans no longer use precious metals, which would make their products prohibitively expensive.


Information from The History Channel Club

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