Visuelle und verbale Konzeptualisierungen von Trauer in einer Umbruchsituation: Allan Ramsay skizziert sein totes Kind

The British painter Allan Ramsay’s physiognomic sketch of his first son, deceased at the age of 14 months in 1741, can provide some insight into the shift of emotional response towards death during the eighteenth century. Although never used for the execution of an autonomous painting according to available visual conventions, Ramsay directed the attention of his conversation partners to the image, apparently in an attempt to claim a stoic firmness of character for himself modelled on prototypes found in the tradition of Italian artistic biographies. While this later response remains within the early modern conventions of emotional restraint, the symbolically ›unframed‹ oil sketch of his dead child belongs to a more individual experience of emotions inspired by Scottish Enlightenment philosophy. For this new experience, however, there was yet no visual language available, as demonstrated in a comparison with the icon of ›sensibility mourning‹ devised by the American painter Charles Willson Peale a generation later.