Elihu Vedder

Elihu Vedder was born in New York City in 1836 and passed away in Italy in 1923. Throughout his life, he lived between various cities in the US, France, and Italy, but resided permanently in Rome. His work covered many genres and media, from illustrations and landscape painting to sculpture to stained glass design and mural painting referencing Macchiaioli and Pre-Raphaelite traditions and the influence of Art Nouveau, Romanticism, and symbolism.

Vedder’s career was financially tumultuous, as he never established an identifiable style, nor did his work appeal to the avant-garde tastes of his time. He went to Turner, Maine – where he painted The Motherless – in an effort to reawaken his creativity and to defy his acquaintance Ralph Waldo Emerson’s theory that “Nature was the same on the banks of the Kennebec as on the banks of the Tiber,” by testing if a place like Turner could provide the same level of artistic inspiration as Europe could.  In the end, he claims to have found nothing truly inspiring, in part due to the United State’s lack of great masters. 

Text Sources:

Regina Soria. "Vedder, Elihu." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed April 28, 2014, http://0-www.oxfordartonline.com.helin.uri.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T088404.

Vedder, Elihu. The Digressions of V.. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910.https://archive.org/details/digressionsofv00veddrich (accessed February 19, 2014), 267-270.

Tutag, Nola Mary Huse, “A Reconstruction of the Career of Elihu Vedder Based Upon the Unpublished Letters and Documents of the Artist, his Family, and Correspondents Held by the Archives or American Art,” Dissertation, Wayne State University, 1969, Page 71. 

Image Source:
Gift of the artist to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.