This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Born in New York City, Elihu Vedder was known as a painter of many
esoteric subjects and was a leading symbolistic painter whose
post-Civil War work evokes melancholy and tragedy. With the
publication of "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam," his illustrations set high
standards for artist designed books.
He spent his youth in
Schenectady, New York, studied art in New York City and Paris and then
spent four years in Florence, Italy. Penniless, he returned to
New York at the start of the Civil War and turned to commercial art
including sketches for "Vanity Fair" and diagrams for instructing
people in the use of dumbbells. At the end of the war, he left
the United States and spent the remaining fifty-eight years of his life
in Europe, primarily Rome and the Island of Capri.
In 1884, he
published his major work, over 50 illustrations for "The Rubaiyat of
Omar Khayyam. " He created designs for the entire book and
included intriguing drawings and hand-drawn letters. Based on the
poetry of a Persian mathematician and originally written about 1120
A.D., the work had been translated in the 19th century by an
Englishman, Edward FitzGerald, and had become treasured for its
spiritual and poetic writing by aesthetes including Vedder.
The
artist's own life had instances of life and death that paralleled
Khayyam's message of fate, death, and renewal of life. In 1872,
his infant son died, and the following year a daughter was born. His
first born son died in 1875, and another son was born that same year. |
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Elihu Vedder is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Paris Pre 1900
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