Young burying his daughter (Night-Thoughts, t2, Lejay, 1769) - Mercier after Marillier

The designer seems to have drawn on the general atmosphere of the work rather than a single moment from the text to produce this image: indeed, Les Nuits does feature the death of the narrator's daughter, Narcisse, but the text neither describes her funeral nor names Young; instead, it focuses on the dark meditations that result. On the other hand, it seems that Young is writing The Nights with his wife Elizabeth Lee and the daughter she had from a first marriage in mind, both of whom died in the years before the book's publication. If this is the case, Young is not burying his daughter in the image, but his prematurely-deceased daughter-in-law.