Elihu Vedder

American

6 paintings in our database

Vedder's Rubáiyát illustrations were among the most commercially successful art books of the late nineteenth century.

Biography

Elihu Vedder (1836–1923) was an American painter and illustrator who spent most of his career in Rome, developing a highly individual symbolist style. Born in New York, he trained briefly in Paris under François-Édouard Picot before settling in Florence in 1857 and then Rome from 1866, where he remained for the rest of his life. His early American work, produced during Civil War years, included haunting proto-Symbolist paintings. His enormous fame rested on his illustrated Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1884), a graphic masterpiece introducing his distinctive decorative symbolism to a vast audience. His easel paintings — The Fates Gathering in the Stars (1887), Ideal Head — Dawn (1886), Fisherman and Mermaid (1888), and Delilah (1886) — inhabit a dreamlike antique space between classicism and Symbolism. His Roman literary circle included Henry James and John Addington Symonds, giving his intellectual concerns a cosmopolitan depth unusual among American painters.

Artistic Style

Vedder's style is difficult to categorise: part Pre-Raphaelite in its linear refinement, part Symbolist in its mysterious iconography, part classicist in its references to antique art. His figures inhabit timeless mythological or allegorical spaces rendered in muted, harmonious earth tones punctuated by jewelled colour. The Fates Gathering in the Stars is characteristic: draped female figures in a night sky, painted with an enamel-like finish and compositional rhythm derived from classical frieze sculpture. His ideal heads — Dawn, Delilah — are radiant, serene, and slightly unsettling in their perfection.

Historical Significance

Vedder's Rubáiyát illustrations were among the most commercially successful art books of the late nineteenth century. His easel paintings occupy a distinctive position as American Symbolism — a parallel current to the French Symbolist movement that developed largely independently in Rome. His long Roman career made him a significant cultural bridge between American expatriate circles and European intellectual life.

Things You Might Not Know

•Vedder lived in Rome for most of his adult life, becoming one of the most successful American expatriate artists of the 19th century while maintaining deep American connections through his subject matter.
•His illustrations for Edward FitzGerald's 'Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam' (1884) were considered the finest American illustrated book of the 19th century and went through dozens of editions, making Vedder internationally famous.
•He was fascinated by the supernatural, mysticism, and dream states, and his paintings of strange, floating figures and cosmic visions are unlike anything else in American 19th-century art.
•He decorated the rotunda of the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. with mosaic designs, giving him a monumental public presence in America despite living in Italy.
•He wrote a lengthy autobiography, 'The Digressions of V.', that is considered one of the wittiest and most self-aware artist memoirs of the Victorian era.

Influences & Legacy

Shaped By

William Blake — Vedder absorbed Blake's visionary symbolism and his conviction that painting could express metaphysical states
The Italian Renaissance — Vedder's Roman life gave him direct access to Italian Renaissance painting and Pompeian wall painting, both of which influenced his decorative and mural work
George Frederick Watts — the English Symbolist painter's allegorical ambitions paralleled and influenced Vedder's own monumental symbolic subjects

Went On to Influence

American Symbolism — Vedder is one of the founders of an American Symbolist tradition that would influence Albert Pinkham Ryder and others
American mural painting — his Library of Congress mosaics contributed to the emerging tradition of monumental American public art