Doe and Hope

Description

The inch thick shaped marble plaque with canted corners and holes for wall mounting, the face hand incised “Miss Shaw, Teacher of Music, Violin and Piano” survives from the late Victorian period.

The condition of the plaque is good and stable. There are sections of cracking around a drilled hole to one side but this hasn’t compromised the piece and overall it could still be described as good. She remains in as found order therefore un-cleaned and untouched and the marble now has a subtly weathered and slightly forlorn, but evocative look to it, commensurate with being wall mounted on a porch wall or gate-post.

Music tuition in the late nineteenth century would have been a more formal affair that it is today and Miss Shaw would have no doubt been teaching the enriched middle classes, probably in a Victorian double fronted house with a long drive, good door furniture and a cottage garden.

Undeniably this would suit a Miss Shaw with a knack of teaching the violin and the piano perfectly but it proves a wonderfully evocative, tactile and attractive decorative wall element all the same for the rest of us.