Today, the necklace is considered an art piece. It sits in a museum, carefully tucked away in a box on a shelf in a climate-controlled collection room. No curator worth their degrees would dare try it on -- or admit to it, anyway. “A Mother’s Pearls,” as it’s called, is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s a pretty late example of miniature painting, completed by Thomas Seir Cummings in 1841, long after the miniatures craze had swept the art world and the petit bourgeoisie of Europe and the Americas. But his wife, Jane, may well have wanted to have something to remember all their children, trends be damned.
The oldest ones occupy the portraits towards the center of their necklace. The first child, a boy named Charles, died in 1831. His extra small portrait occupies center stage, smiling out from a tiny frame in the middle, perhaps the most frozen of them all.
All the other children, six more in total, are off to the sides. They were painted as they were at the time, some young enough to have the blank, soft look that little children often have - half-formed, the shapes of their adult faces not yet visible beneath shifting cartilage, baby fat, and the wide, searching eyes of toddlers. That may also be a consequence of an artist father who had practice in idealizing people, painting them as they wanted to see and be seen.
Five children followed the necklace. Their miniatures were never added to the brood of ivory portrait ovals.
Poor Jane -- even if her husband had steady work as a painter and teacher, even if he was renowned as one of the best portrait miniaturists of his day, she was still the one embroiled in the ugly side of having all those children. The pregnancies, the labors, the grinding work of raising toddlers all add up, even when you get married at the energetic age of 15, as Jane Cook did.
After all that, she barely gets a mention. Hell, it takes a bit of digging to find an image of her, and she had an artist husband who made finely detailed portraits his bread and butter.
That portrait is from 1835, when Jane would have been about 31. She wears a yellow dress with voluminous sleeves that billow down over her biceps. Curls tumble down over her temples while she delicately places a finger on her bracelet, showing it off to the viewer with an unfocused smile. Jane lived for five more decades, dying in 1889 and predeceasing her husband by just a few years until his own death in 1894.
It must have been a pretty good life -- successful artist husband, nice dress, many children surviving to adulthood -- but the chocolate box illustration of a 30-something Jane doesn’t make you feel as if you’re seeing a real person. It’s an image of an ideal. Mother. Wife. Fashionista, maybe.
I don’t think that she really wore this necklace. Although it must have held sentimental value for her and the paintings were delicately done, I can’t help but think that the act of wearing it would have made the whole thing look like a novelty piece, a lump of interesting but inelegant costume jewelry. Can you imagine wearing this thing to a party, sweating on the delicate ivory, trying to look elegant with portraits thumping just above your collarbone?
I think this was meant to be viewed in private, held for a few minutes in the hand or maybe shown off to a visitor while it sat in a box. It's an extravagance, but a sentimental one surely more for the benefit of its owner and maker rather than potential admirers (jealous neighbors, maybe, seeing how loved this family was, how ostentatiously treasured its mother).
Let’s say she opened it up on occasion and looked at the tiny faces, the still, quiet, composed versions of her children, and was flooded by a series of memories that were the near opposite of the clean, sedate images. Dirty diapers, sibling fights, the weight of a child sitting in her lap, falling asleep at her breast, stamping their feet and whining, leaning against her in the quiet moments that became increasingly rare as the number of children in her household ballooned. A woman whose dress was often stained by regurgitated breast milk, whose back hurt, who was so tired she forgot what it was to be rested, who loved her children with an animal affection that could never be put into words or captured in the oval of a portrait.
Some of these children surely proved serious, others foolish. All have been gone for many years now. She may have sometimes looked at it and wept for the passage of time and her pending mortality. Wouldn’t you?
Or perhaps she saw how her artist husband made convenient omissions, smoothing their son's cowlick and correcting one daughter's slightly lazy eye, another one's crooked nose. These are only perfect ghosts of her real children. Why did he make this? Was it in honor of his real children, for his real wife, or the phantom ideals of both?
She might have thought of the story still left for the living. Perhaps the older ones could have another miniature made - their father painted the originals, after all - and set into a nice frame. Then they could press it into the hands of their own beloved, securing their place in another person’s memory for at least a little while longer, until it, too, sat tucked away in a box in someone's silent collection.
Here, they might say, this is how I want you to remember me, always at this crystalline moment in time, free of blemish and doubt. I am small and encapsulated. See how easy it is to carry me and feel no weight at all?
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