"Professor Blachowicz has been looking at gravestones for over forty years. . . . The journal Markers, published by the Association for Gravestone Studies (est. 1977), provides an outlet for discoveries, and alongside this the literature on the subject is steadily growing, with major academic books emerging on a specialized state basis. Blachowicz is in the vanguard of these studies, and [his] two volumes together form the most thorough account of them all.
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[Volume II] is extremely lucid – the author is a philosophy professor, so perhaps this is not wholly surprising. It begins with an account of the Geyer family of German immigrants to Boston, who arrived in 1750 and produced a diverse range of stones spread from New York to New Hampshire. All executed in fine-grained slate, the shallow reliefs of cherubs and skulls, suns and moons, coffins and crowns are far removed from what is found on their later eighteenth-century equivalents in Britain. Blachowicz builds up a highly convincing chronology for this workshop, and then proceeds to do the same for other dynasties of stone cutters, such as the Lamsons, Fowle, Homer (“the Boston Mainstay”), the Noyes, the Soules and many others besides. And let us for a moment simply salute the names of these craftsmen, which so resonate in an English ear: Shubael Treat, Eliphalet Dame, Ebenezer and Beza Soule, Herodian Marble.
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Blachowicz’s interest – besides the stones themselves – is biographical: his concern is with the actuality of business lives. His aim is to build up oeuvres, to assign production to recognizable hands, to establish workshop traditions and to pin down just who was creating what.
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Book publication has always faced the dilemma of keeping up with discoveries: one suspects that Blachowicz’s ongoing mission may have to be conducted electronically in the future. The flash-drive is an extremely neat solution to the challenge of including over 1,500 colour illustrations, but thankfully the superb monochrome reproductions in the book continue the high quality achieved in Volume I, and make looking at this book an aesthetic pleasure in its own right.
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Beside documentary sources and signatures, there is another visual tool which helps to establish the output of individual stone-cutter workshops. The “freytag 27+ scale” is one of Blachowicz’s most unusual tools for identifying hands. Based on a close analysis of letter forms, it takes its name from the letters, numbers and symbols that he feels most readily show idiosyncrasies of approach. Set out alongside each other, these marks do indeed have a consistent individuality about them that makes this a clearly useful tool of attribution. Comparisons could be drawn with the nineteenth-century critic Giovanni Morelli, whose detective-like approach to connoisseurship involved a close study of ears and fingers in paintings as give-away clues to authorship. Blachowicz’s eye is penetrating, highly trained, and his method in studying and comparing such a mass of material from across a wide distance is quite frankly daunting.
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What of the stones themselves – as sculpture? Thanks to the razor-sharp photographs, they can be appreciated as creations in their own right. Moon-faced cherubs stare out, wide-eyed and inscrutable; their wings range from the rustic Baroque, to linear abstractions. Portraits range from the primitive to the compelling: the “face in niche“ stones attributed to Joseph Brown in the 1790s are particularly arresting. The preferred device of the early 19th century tombstone, the weeping willow, in depicted in many variations, from drooping fronds to staccato incisions. The pattern-making of borders and backgrounds is constantly on the move and consistently delightful. Death comes in many guises, from whole skeletons to weirdly abstracted skulls. The later 19th century stones (generally of marble) are less enticing and generally far plainer.
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There still remain aspects of the art of the tombstone which don’t come in for treatment in either volume. . . . These omissions are out of scope for Blachowicz, who – in taking on an entire trade across a century or more – should certainly not be charged with a lack of ambition.
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The second volume of From Slate to Marble is every bit as impressive as the earlier one. It brings new discoveries to the field, and is clearly a major contribution to the topic. Its rigour, logic, penetrating analysis and investigative zeal are each remarkable. The result is the charting of a fascinating industry across more than a century, and the rediscovery of formerly forgotten hands at work. These hands created some of the most arresting objects to survive from these early years on the Eastern seaboard of America. Blachowicz’s greatest achievement is to bring their world back to life."