The Art and Architecture of Death
If Father Pitt reads this eroded inscription correctly, this is a tombstone for a two-year-old child named William Davis, son of James and Eliza Davis, who died in 1848. The epitaph is almost certainly a poem, but illegible in this light. The tombstone itself is a restrained example of the middle-nineteenth-century style that old Pa Pitt calls the “poster style,” because it resembles the style of printed posters of the same era.
Art Deco was popular only for a few decades in the early and middle twentieth century, and it never became a very popular style for cemetery monuments. But among the wealthy residents of the Homewood Cemetery, a restrained and tasteful Art Deco was quite fashionable in the years from roughly 1930 to 1950. In many cases it takes the form of a streamlining and radical simplification of classical and Gothic styles. Some of these monuments look like pieces of sets from the world’s most somber RKO musical.
