Beyond the Veil

The visual history of how we deal with death—grief, mourning, funerals, symbols, and ceremonies—is fascinatingly rich. Focusing on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and travelling from Victorian England to the US, Beyond the Veil is a visual tour through this curious world, charting the often peculiar and at times macabre ways in which the living memorialise the dead.

Humans have always had ways of marking death, but in Victorian England, death became a morbid obsession that went global—death was as much 'celebrated' as it was a source of fear and sadness. Queen Victoria herself became a figurehead of grief after the death of her beloved Prince Albert in 1861. Her ensuing fascination with death took many visual forms—from her ritualised embrace of black clothing to the building of ostentatious monuments—and massively influenced cultural norms in both the UK and further afield.

The Victorians built complex cemeteries, collected precious memento mori, commissioned bizarre death portraits, and obsessed over the correct mourning attire and funerary protocol. Meanwhile, turn-of-the-century America saw reflections of many of these cultural phenomena. The bestsellers of the period were often about life and death (think Frankenstein and Dracula), while the art, architecture, and style—with its often dark and heavy gothic overtones—reveled in the glamourisation of death.

Beyond the Veil brings this extraordinarily elaborate and stylised visual culture together while expertly explaining and elaborating on its most peculiar and fascinating aspects.