Famous Graves & Memorial Design Archive

The most visited famous graves are Jim Morrison at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, Marilyn Monroe at Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles, Bruce Lee and Brandon Lee at Lake View Cemetery in Seattle, Oscar Wilde at Père Lachaise, and Frank Sinatra at Desert Memorial Park in Cathedral City, California.

Père Lachaise gets more than 3.5 million visitors a year. That makes it the most visited cemetery in the world. Hollywood Forever in Los Angeles draws large crowds during summer movie screenings and the Día de Muertos festival.

Glenn Gould is buried at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto, Ontario. His flat granite marker is engraved with the opening notes of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations BWV 988. That is the work that made his career. He recorded it in 1955 and again in 1981.

Mount Pleasant Cemetery is also where you will find Sir Frederick Banting, who helped discover insulin, and Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King.

This archive covers five eras.

Victorian (1837 to 1901). Tall marble obelisks, weeping angels, and lots of religious symbols. Edwardian (1901 to 1914). Calmer classical revival shapes with less ornament. Art Deco (1920s to 1940s). Bold geometric shapes and sculpted monuments like Oscar Wilde’s tomb. Mid-Century Modern (1945 to 1970). Low flat granite markers with very little ornament. Contemporary (1970 to present). Custom shapes, laser etching, and personal designs.

A headstone is a stone that marks one grave. It can stand up or lie flat. A monument is bigger. It is often used for a whole family or to remember an event. It may include sculpture or a few inscriptions. A memorial is the broadest word. It covers anything that honors a person or event. Headstones, monuments, mausoleums, plaques, and cenotaphs are all memorials.

Most cemetery markers people see today are headstones. The word “monument” is usually saved for the larger or more detailed pieces.

Père Lachaise opened in 1804. It was one of the first cemeteries in Europe to accept people of any religion or nationality. That was unusual at the time. The hillside layout, old plane trees, and detailed Romantic-era and Art Nouveau monuments drew many famous burials in the 1800s and 1900s.

Famous graves at Père Lachaise include Frédéric Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, Édith Piaf, Marcel Proust, Honoré de Balzac, Sarah Bernhardt, Georges Bizet, and Maria Callas.

Oscar Wilde’s tomb was designed by Sir Jacob Epstein. Epstein was a British-American sculptor. The tomb was unveiled in 1914. It shows a flying winged figure carved from one block of stone. The shape is an Art Deco take on an Assyrian winged bull. The back of the stone has a verse from Wilde’s poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.”

In 2011 the cemetery added a glass barrier around the tomb. The barrier protects it from the lipstick kisses left by visitors over the years. The tomb is also covered in our Art Deco memorial design era page.

Polished grey, black, and red granite are the most common stones for celebrity headstones from the 1900s and 2000s. Granite is hard, holds up to weather, and keeps detail well. Marble was the main stone in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. It has fallen out of favour because it is softer and wears down faster.

Sandstone was common for 1800s family plots in North America. You can see it on Susanna Moodie’s marker at Belleville Cemetery. Bronze plaques on a granite or concrete base became popular in mid-1900s lawn-style cemeteries. Frank Sinatra’s marker at Desert Memorial Park is one example.

Yes. Photos of famous graves follow normal copyright rules. The photographer owns the rights to the image. Many high quality grave photos on Wikimedia Commons are released under Creative Commons or Public Domain licenses. The Library of Congress photos by Carol M. Highsmith are in the public domain with no known restrictions.

The grave itself is usually not protected once it is set up in a public cemetery. But the photo of it still is. This archive only uses Public Domain, CC0, and CC BY photos. Every photo has a credit line on the page.

Famous epitaphs are recorded in cemetery archives, biographies, and online sources like Wikimedia Commons, the Library of Congress, and Find a Grave. Our Famous Epitaphs Library sorts them by tone. Categories include religious, poetic, humorous, family, historical, and literary.

Well known epitaphs include Mel Blanc’s “That’s All Folks” at Hollywood Forever, Spike Milligan’s “I Told You I Was Ill” at St Thomas’s Church in Winchelsea, William Shakespeare’s curse on grave movers at Holy Trinity Church Stratford, and Emily Dickinson’s “Called Back” at West Cemetery in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Every photo in this archive is licensed under Public Domain, CC0, or CC BY only. We do not use CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND, or any other restricted licenses.

Each photo has a credit line. The credit shows the photographer, the license type with a link to the license terms, and a link to the source on Wikimedia Commons or the Library of Congress. Read our Editorial Standards page for our full sourcing and fact checking policy.