3 January 1946, Belfast – 16 January 2008, Georgetown Neighborhood, Washington, DC Conisbee was a celebrated art historian and museum curator who began his career as a professor in the UK before he was hired by Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts to be an associate curator of French painting. From there, he moved to Los […]
24 December 1777 – 16 November 1850 Menagerist This headstone is very sweet and might make you think kindly of the person it immortalizes, but George Wombwell was no champion of animal welfare. Wombwell was a shoemaker from Essex who stumbled into exotic-animal-collecting when he bought two boa constrictors on the London docks and started […]
11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001 #TowelDay was started 20 years ago (25 May 2001) to commemorate Adams’ death and honor his work, particularly The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Adams is buried in Highgate East, his headstone a simple gray tablet with a jaunty placard labeled 42 for those in-the-know to appreciate. Fans […]
Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault 26 September 1791 – 26 January 1824 Géricault was an influential artist who was one of the pioneers of the Romantic movement and is considered the first major painter of French Romanticism. Romanticism is a vast artistic movement that touched every corner of art and design throughout the early 1800s and […]
July 22, 1804, Paris, France — December 26, 1893, Houilles Schœlcher was the the son of a porcelain manufacturer (Marc Schœlcher, also listed on this headstone) whose political and social awakening took place while on a trip for the family business which took him throughout North America. It was on this trip that he first […]
22 March 1923 – 22 September 2007 I visited Père Lachaise in March of 2008 which was just a few months after M. Marceau had passed away. His headstone was not yet ready, but his grave was covered in flowers and other mementos left by mourners. (In regards to the note in the photo with […]
11 June 1847 (Aldeburgh, Suffolk) – 5 August 1929 (London) Millicent Garrett Fawcett was a leader in the women’s suffrage movement in England, heading up the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), but most Americans, at least, won’t have heard of her. I consider myself not a scholar of the UK and US suffragist […]
Clara Diana Shaw Kennedy 1855 – January 1902 James Frederick Shaw Kennedy 1849 – 24 November 1901 This is the coffin of the Clara Diana, kept in a building that backed up to the wall between the cemetery and the church beyond in West Highgate Cemetery. There were stacks of old coffins in this dark […]
1 March 1810 – 17 October 1849 My favorite headstone in Pere Lachaise is Chopin’s. I was there while someone was working on touching up the details on the memorial, painting the engraved words so they would be sharp and readable (you can see both the worker and the work they had completed so far […]
1 Aug 1976 — 28 Oct 2010 (aged 34) This beautiful headstone is in Highgate Cemetery East which, unlike it’s West counterpart, can be explored freely by visitors. The East section still shares the rather untended, haphazard layout of its West cousin, but many of the headstones are downright whimsical and modern in the artistic […]