Fabulous Circa 1830 Love Token With Tiny Cut Paper Hand, Woven Paper Heart & Hair

Peggy McClard Antiques

Americana & Folk Art

	This is a really fabulous love token with a tiny cut-paper hand, woven paper heart, two serrated-edge, and hair braid laid down in the shape of two end-to-end hearts and blue ribbons. Put together it a great red painted frame with carved, gold painted frame liner, this token really speaks to me. The 7 5/8" x 5 7/8" frame has an early hanging loop so that the frame could be hung with the hand facing up and it is wired on the back so that you could hang it the other way so that the inscription is in a legible position. The penciled inscription "When this you see remember me" is a well-loved 19th century sentiment that was often used on samplers and love/friendship tokens alike. Beginning in the early decades of the 19th century, women and young ladies kept memory books and friendship albums which they filled with paper and fabric cuttings of hearts and hands embellished with woven or otherwise arranged hair of friends and family. Woven hearts and hands embellished with hair were traded as 19th century tokens of love and friendship. The double lobed heart has been the symbol of love since antiquity, showing up in Cro-Magnon pictograms and early Egyptian paintings. European immigrants brought the heart as the symbol of romantic love to America where they added two other symbols, the heart and hand and the heart in hand which both symbolized the heart's guidance of the hand's actions. This beautiful and sensitive image of love shows up in highly collectible Christmas, New Years, and Valentine greetings and declarations of love. Because hair does not disintegrate if it is properly protected, American women made it a symbol of abiding love as well as deeply felt loss. Mothers kept locks of their children's hair and unmarried women often gave locks of their hair to suitors as tokens of love. Locks of sitter's hair were often added to miniature portraits. A popular nineteenth-century women's periodical described hair ". . . at once the most delicate and last of our materials. [It] survives us like love. It is so light, so gentle, so escaping from the idea of death, that, with a lock of hair belonging to a child or friend we may almost look up to heaven and compare notes with angelic nature, may almost say, I have a piece of thee here, not unworthy of thy being now."¹ This is a great piece of American folk art and of 19th century women's art. Circa 1830. (#4756) $1500 References: Eisenbarth, Erin E., "Made for Love: Selections from the Jane Katcher Collection of Americana", Spring 2007, Antiques & Fine Art. (online article at antiquesandfineart.com) Lefko, Linda Carter, "*'When this you see remember me' Tokens of Remembrance & Love", Fall 2006, The Decorator, publication of the Historical Society of Early American Decoration. (online article at lclefko.com) Shaw, Robert. "United as this Heart You See: Memories of Friendship and Family", Expressions of Innocence and Eloquence Selections from the Jane Katcher Collection of Americana, Ed. Jane Katcher, David A. Schorsch, Ruth Wolfe. Marquand Books, 2006. 85-101. Ockenga, Starr. On Women & Friendship A Collection of Victorian Keepsakes and Traditions. Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1993. 107-117. ¹Shaw, id.* at 101 (quoting Leigh Hunt, Godey's Lady's Book (May 1855)). Please see our Tokens of Love & Friendship page for more information.


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