A Decent Burial

Elsie Palmer Payne
A Decent Burial
Watercolor on paper, 1942
17 1/2 x 21 1/2 inches
Gift of the estate
1971.002

A Decent Burial is a studio work made in the early 1940s at Elsie Palmer Payne’s home in Los Angeles. It is based on a sketch done in Italy in the 1920s. She has transformed the sketch into a poignant Brittany scene depicting the burial of an infant. The grieving mother moves stiffly forward, carrying the small coffin on her head. The gray sky casts a palm of gloom, yet the path is bathed in sunlight, perhaps a foretelling of the life beyond.