The Dead Bride

Figures

Figure 1.

P. R. Vallée (France; active U.S. 1803–1815), Harriet Mackie (The Dead Bride) (1788–1804), probably 1804, watercolor on ivory; verso, plaited hair, 2H x 2 in. (6.4 x 5.1 cm) oval, Signed l.l. in graphite: Vallée, Mabel Brady Garvan Collection, Yale University Art Gallery, 1936.300.

Portrait miniatures are among the most personal forms of artistic expression, and few offer deeper insight into American private life than Vallée’s The Dead Bride (figure 1). It conveys, in a different way than texts, how much our understanding of death and our relationship to those who have died has changed over time. Painted in watercolor on ivory and housed in a rose-gold locket, this portrait would have been worn close to the heart and looked at in private, as one would approach a secret. Through the commissioning of this token small enough to hold in the palm of one’s hand, someone in Charleston, South Carolina in 1804 acquired a visible past —a tangible link with a teenaged girl both loved and mourned. By reconstructing as far as possible the history of her life and death, we restore to this miniature its power to suggest the intimate communion between the self and another. ¹

The miniaturist’s name has traditionally been given as Jean François de Vallée, supposedly a textile manufacturer who corresponded with Thomas Jefferson, but no documentary evidence supports this. However, advertisements in the local press reveal that between 1803 and 1806 one P.R. Vallée did work in Charleston, and his technical virtuosity reveals him to have been a mature miniaturist when he arrived there. ² He announced in the Times: “Mr. P. Vallée, Miniature Painter, LATELY arrived from Paris, offers his services to the Ladies and Gentlemen of this City, in the line of his profession; he warrants the most correct LIKENESS.” ³

Vallée’s likeness of Harriet Mackie was taken from her corpse, dressed in a white empire bridal gown, with a veil and garland of white roses crowning her head. Painting the dead cannot be easy. Vallée might have secured Harriet’s slack jaw with a strap and continued to work as decomposition set in. It was rare for a miniaturist to depict the dead with closed eyes, as Vallée did. Usually the eyes were open, so that the memory of the living person could be preserved. The decision to leave Harriet’s long-lashed lids closed and record her pallor reveals a need to remember not only the features of a living person, but to fix them in death.

Vallée’s image likens death to a blissful sleep, recalling recumbent or reclining mortuary statues from the Middle Ages to the present day. Harriet’s repose suggests the words used by Christ when raising the daughter of Jairus from the dead: Dormit, non est mortua. The serenity of Harriet’s expression, the comfortable pillow behind her head, and the hint of domestic furniture at the lower left envision sleep as a state of transition between home as protective haven in life and heaven as protective home in the afterlife. Later in the century, this idea of a domesticated heaven would serve as comfort in popular images and consolatory poetry. For the wearer of this locket, the visual metaphor suggests the place the deceased occupied in the mourner’s mind, asleep until they meet again at home in heaven.

Harriet followed the English bridal custom of wearing roses in her hair; ⁴ however, her bridal garland could also be interpreted as a funeral chaplet, a symbol used in ancient times and revived in Revolutionary France, which was given as an offering by the bereaved to the deceased in funerary monuments. ⁵ Here, the chaplet symbolizes the perpetuation of Harriet’s memory by the person who commissioned this miniature. It also serves as a traditional token of her purity; in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia was buried wearing her virgin’s garland. ⁶ Harriet’s chaplet is adorned with roses; stylized roses...