Existing comment:
Hair brooch, ca 1810
This mourning design was likely painted with pigments containing chopped hair. The scene depicts two doves holding a string forming a cipher in a formation reminiscent of a memorial motto included in an early 19th-century English emblem book.
The cipher "DE" refers to Dorothy Evans, who married Richard Fee, a Barbados plantation owner, around 1721. Evans and Fee were from prominent English families who settled in Barbados during the early 18th century. |