Stunning Sculpture at Pere Lachaise

Tomb  of Romantic painter Théodore Géricault, who died in 1824.

Most of the funerary sculpture to be found in cemeteries is easily familiar: angels with wings, cherubic infants, grieving mothers and more. And, by and large, that’s true at Paris’s most famous cemetery, Pere Lachaise.

But I’ve always been fascinated with the ones that break the mold and ask us to think perhaps in other ways about death and memory. Here are a few that have caught my eye, including the one above; the broken bass on the grave is the work of its occupant, painter-sculptor Armand Arman who is, the plaque  says, “Alone at  last!”

Some of the monuments are the works of especially notable sculptors. The one above was the last work of Auguste Bartholdi, creator of the Statue of Liberty.  It honors Sergent Hoff, a French hero of the 1870 war, and shows a grateful France writing “France remembers you” on the base.

This surrealistic piece by Andrey Lekarski marks the tomb of Christiane and Jean Nitzel, philanthropists.

In quite a different vein from individual honors, these are two of several monuments honoring victims who died in the Nazi concentration camps to which many French Jews were deported.