Afternoon walk at Spring Grove

Tuesday
A beautiful sunny warm day, after a cold start. We went down to Music Live at Lunch as usual -:quite a different program to last week’s Mardi Gras music. This week was Baroque music, played by the St.Thomas Bach Ensemble. They started with a beautiful Albinoni oboe concerto, played by Dwight Parry, who is principal oboist with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Afterwards, we went walking at Spring Grove Cemetery and Arboretum, always a nice scenic peaceful walk, and with the added bonus at this time of year of being paved roads, and not muddy paths!
You may be surprised to see a Sphinx as a memorial in a cemetery, and it’s true that it caused a great stir when it was installed in 1850, the “pagan” iconography of the Egyptian sphinx ruffling the Christian sensibilities of the Victorians. Yet there were others who praised the monument as a break in the monotony of the usual gravestone shapes of neoclassical columns, mourning figures, flower-adorned markers and obelisks. It was installed by Davis Bevan Lawler to honour his parents, former Philadelphia mayor Matthew Lawler (1755-1831) and Ann Bevan Lawler (1761-1835). The Lawlers were previously buried in Cincinnati’s Episcopal Burial Ground, but Davis had their remains moved to Spring Grove not long after it opened. Lawler was instrumental in the establishment of Spring Grove. Davis was a world traveler, and so it maybe reflects his interest in world culture and history. If you look carefully at the top left image, you will see I wasn’t the only one trying to capture the beauty of the day and place - a lady artist had her easel set up and was painting the scene.