Search >> Vedder, Elihu (1836-1923)

Illustrator, Essayist, Artist.

While still an adolescent, Elihu Vedder left New York and traveled with his family to the Caribbean, where he determined to be an artist. He journeyed to France in 1856 to study painting with Francois Edouard Picot; while in Europe he traveled in Italy and began a lifelong fascination with its art and landscape. Vedder returned to New York prior to the outbreak of the Civil War and tried to complete sketches for Vanity Fair while working to succeed as an artist; he recalls in his autobiography that he could earn fifty cents for an idea, $1.50 for an idea and a suggestive sketch, and $5 for a sketch drawn on a block, "But I found that my training, such as it was, was too serious for the touch-and-go style then in vogue" (Vedder, Digressions 198). During this lean period, he was often reduced to austere living conditions, once subsisting only on crackers and sausage (194).

By 1865 he had finished some of the paintings that would bring him critical acclaim. Appleton’s Journal states that Vedder’s Egyptian "Sphinx" and "Sea Serpent" was "the talk in art circles," and characterizes his work as "striking and original," though lacking in finish (“Brief Notes” 155). In 1869 Vedder married Caroline Beach Rosekrans with whom he had three children, and though he frequently visited and exhibited in America, he relocated to Italy, maintaining homes in Rome and Capri. One of his most well-known endeavors is his illustration of Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam; Vedder composed a series of fifty intricate drawings which were exhibited in Boston in 1887 and are now held by the Smithsonian.

From painting and illustrating, Vedder turned to mural work and fulfilled a commission at the Library of Congress in 1896-97. His mural, Government, on the walls of the library "represents the abstract conception of a republic as the ideal state" (Library of Congress). His mural work also appears in Bowdoin College’s Walker Art Building on the west wall (1894) and on the ceiling of the Collis P. Huntington mansion in New York (W. Downes, “Elihu Vedder”).

Vedder published his autobiographical ruminations as The Digressions of V (1910). His paintings hang in galleries, colleges, and museums across the country including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Institute, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Cornell University, Brigham Young University, Wellesley College, and the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco (Downes). He may have written his own epitaph on the dedication page of Digressions of V, characterizing himself as "[s]ome what o’ershadowed by great names... His aims if any are but these,--To be remembered and to please" (Vedder). He died in Rome in 1923.

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References & Biographical Resources

"Brief Notes." Appletons' Journal: A Magazine of General Literature. 1 May 1869: 154-155. [more about this work]

[pages: 154-55]

Downes, William Howe. "Elihu Vedder." Dictionary of American Biography. Base Set. American Council of Learned Societies, 1928-1936. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2006. http://www.galenet.com/servlet/BioRC. [more about this work]

Figaro [Clapp, Henry Jr.]. "Dramatic Feuilleton." New York Saturday Press. 2 Sep. 1865: 72-73. [more about this work]

Figaro recollects a discussion of art with Vedder (73). [pages: 73]

Folsom, Ed and Kenneth M. Price. Re-Scripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to His Life and Work. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. [more about this work]

Vedder is mentioned as a friend of Whitman. [pages: 60]

Folsom, Ed and Kenneth M. Price. "Walt Whitman." The Walt Whitman Archive. http://www.whitmanarchive.org, 2006. [more about this work]

The author mentions that Vedder and Whitman became acquainted during the late 1850s, but does not specifically identify Pfaff's as the location of their meeting.

Karbiener, Karen. "Whitman at Pfaff's: Personal Space, a Public Place, and the Boundary-Breaking Poems of Leaves of Grass (1860)." Literature of New York. Ed. Sabrina Fuchs-Abrams. Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. 1-38. [more about this work]

Vedder is cited as saying that in the 1850s Whitman “had not become famous yet, and I then regarded many of the [Bohemian] boys as his superiors, as they did themselves.”

Parry, Albert. Garrets and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America. New York: Covici, Friede, 1933. [more about this work]

Vedder is mentioned by Parry as one of the frequenters of the Tile Club in the 1880s. [pages: 65]

Vedder, Elihu. The Digressions of V., Written for his Own Fun and that of His Friends, by Elihu Vedder; Containing the Quaint Legends of his Infancy, an Account of his Stay in Florence, the Garden of Lost Opportunities, Return Home on the Track of Columbus, His Struggle. Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1910. [more about this work]

[pages: FP(ill.), 191(ill.), 335(ill.), 385(ill.)]

Winter, William. Old Friends; Being Literary Recollections of Other Days. New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1909. 407 p. [more about this work]

Winter mentions that Vedder was a member Eytinge's "circle of artistic companionship." Winter gives Vedder's current whereabouts as Capri, Italy, in the "Tower of the Four Winds" (319). [pages: 319]