Talking about Death - Western Culture VI

The visual imagery of death created in the nineteenth century represents a diversity of attempts to come to terms with this kind of disruption and discontinuity.
These images are sometimes the secondary products of social practices like funerals and burials. In other cases, they are primary expressions of the grief process.
In all instances, they reflect an impulse unique to the era in which they were made. This impulse can be described as a romantic and sentimental desire to surmount the fact of separation.