Angel of Grief

This beautiful reproduction of The Angel of Grief can be seen at the Chapel of the Chimes on Mission Boulevard near the corner of Mission and Tamarack. The original was sculpted in 1894 by William Wetmore Story, and it serves as the grave stone of the artist and his wife at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. The term is now used to describe grave stones throughout the world sculpted in the style of the Story stone.

William Wetmore Story was born to Salem, Massachusetts, in 1819, and graduated from Harvard College in 1838 and Harvard Law School in 1840. He left the practice of law to become a sculptor and relocated to Italy in 1848. His most famous sculpture is Cleopatra, which is part of the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

The remarkable and emotional realism of the Angel of Grief has made it famous, and it has become a copied funeral monument model all over the world, especially in the United States, where many reproductions of the work can be found. There is another reproduction on the Stanford Campus in Palo Alto.