Pittsburgh Cemeteries

Tag: Sculpture

Aull–Martin Monument, Homewood Cemetery

A granite monument with a crumbling marble statue on top; it was probably allegorical, but one of the arms would have held the key to the allegory, and both are gone. If old Pa Pitt had to guess, he would suggest that this was a statue of Hope, with the left arm holding up an anchor and the right pointing heavenward. This is certainly a good demonstration of the different aging properties of the two kinds of stone.

The statue may date from 1878, the year the cemetery opened, when the first Martin was buried here; old Pa Pitt suspects that the base is later, replacing an earlier base that had been damaged or become illegible. The individual gravestones in front of the monument are matching in style, and look like the style of the early twentieth century, though they include dates back to 1878. Father Pitt’s guess is that the original base bore inscriptions for all the Martins and Aulls buried up to the time of its replacement.

October 15, 2022
Weber Monument, Homewood Cemetery

An angel steps out of a rusticated boulder to drop a flower on the hallowed ground of the Weber family’s graves.

October 15, 2022
Porter Monument, Allegheny Cemetery

This striking angel is the work of Brenda Putnam, but the cemetery’s site (in an article that has since disappeared) was vague and confusing on dates. It said that the bronze angel was cast “after 1910” as a replica of an original granite sculpture. The earliest dated Putnam work listed in her sparse Wikipedia article is from 1917. Brenda Putnam would have been twenty years old in 1910; she would thus have been a teenager when the granite version was done, if the date “1910” means anything at all. Henry Kirke Porter, identified as “the best-known Porter here” by the cemetery’s site, died in 1921, and perhaps that gives us a better guess at the date of the sculpture.

If old Pa Pitt had to guess, he would imagine that those glorious wings were too heavy for granite, and the bronze cast was made when the original sculpture proved unstable.

October 10, 2022
Rook Monument, Allegheny Cemetery

An elaborately Victorian column with a recording angel at the top and statues of Hope and Faith on the lavish base. (We notice the absence of Charity, perhaps because the Rooks decided to take their money with them in the form of this monument.)

Hope with her anchor.

Faith with her cross.

Note how the shadow of the angel is moving across the Lewis-Elliott monument behind it. If we wait just a few minutes…

Perfect.

October 10, 2022
Daniel O’Neill Monument, Allegheny Cemetery

An editor’s work is never done. Here is Daniel O’Neill, owner and editor of the Dispatch, still at work 145 years after his death in 1877. Though he died at the young age of 47, he had already built the Dispatch into Pittsburgh’s most respected newspaper, a position it held until the great newspaper massacre of the early 1920s, when paper shortages and rising costs forced hundreds or thousands of papers across the country out of business. Before that there had been at least a dozen English dailies in Pittsburgh, not to mention three in German and several in other languages.

The monument itself is a harmoniously eclectic mix of styles in the Victorian manner: classical elements dominate, but Mr. O’Neill’s desk rests on an Egyptian pedestal.

October 10, 2022