Out of Phase: Elihu Vedder - American Symbolist

Numerous posts ago on these pages we made mention, in the context of an enduring mystery concerning a dead man found on an Australian beach in the 1940s - the mystery of the Somerton Man - Edward Fitzgerald's famous translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. See the post here. In the context of that post we noted the extraordinary popularity of Khayyam's quatrains up until, say, the 1960s after which the work retired into the same relative obscurity as many other great works of the orientalist movement. Indeed, we could almost describe what has happened with the following symmetry: after the cultural watershed of the 1960s Khayyam's work was replaced by New Age renderings of Rumi as the central text of popular Western engagement with the Mahometan East. The Rubaiyat is still known, of course, but is no longer a best seller. Rumi - through the lens of such New Age writers as Coleman Barks - is the most widely read poet in contemporary USA. This mantle once belong to Khayyam - through the lens of the orientalist Edward Fitzgerald. This is a revealing point of cultural decline, and there is much we could say about it, but the purpose of the present post is to celebrate the work of the artist who illustrated the preeminent edition of Fitzgerald's rendering, namely Elihu Vedder.

Over a period of ten months from May 1883 through to March 1884 Elihu Vedder completed a series of some fifty four drawings which illustrated the 1884 edition of Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat. These drawings are rightly considered his masterwork and the Vedder-Fitzgerald Rubaiyat is regarded as the pinnacle of late Victorian artist book design. It is a magnificent work in every respect, a masterpiece of orientalist literature, a moment in time when the orientalist genius reached its acme. Not since the work of William Blake had illustration and poetic text come together in such a profound synthesis. Indeed, Vedder's drawings bear comparison with those of Mr. Blake in their visionary strength. Fitzgerald's renderings of Khayyam into English verse are very fine, albeit seeming somewhat antiquated and stolid nowadays, but Vedder's accompanying illustrations are sublime and luminous and enduring. The book as a whole stands as a single work and needs to be appreciated as such, but here are some samples:

The Vedder-Fitzgerald Rubaiyat was published in Boston on November 8 1884. It met widespread acclaim as a masterwork and the edition completely sold out within a week. It established Mr Vedder's reputation as America's greatest spiritual illustrator and more generally as the greatest living American artist. The comparison to Blake is not accidental. He is counted as a 'Symbolist' painter and had a deep interest in the work of Blake along with the mystical poetry of William Butler Yeats. His visual style is informed by the work of the English Pre-Raphaelites but, happily, this is very often turned to overtly orientalist themes. This is what qualifies as 'Symbolist' painting, an altogether ill-defined label for a very diverse movement in modern Western art. Today, the word 'Symbolism' is used with pejorative undertones rather like the word 'Romantic'. The 'Symbolist', though, is often motivated by spiritual, visionary concerns expressed in orientalist and mythological themes. The overlap in this with orientalist art is revealing - Europeans looked to the East for spiritual renewal primarily (an age-old habit of the Western soul). The deepest motivations of Western orientalism were - and still are - essentially spiritual (and not political-imperialist as certain tawdry and shallow sociological theories would have it.) Elihu Vedder is one of the great spiritual artists of this movement and one of America's most profound painters. Regrettably, his reputation is diminished today for the same reasons the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is not widely read. Still, he made his mark upon the art of the American nation; his allegorical murals adorn the reading room at the Library of Congress:

His later work shows a stronger debt to the classicizing styles of such painters as Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Edward Burne-Jones. Here is one of his best known mythological works, the Sibyll Coming to Rome.

What is depicted here is the Sibyll from Cumae clutching her scrolls of prophecy and making out on the road to Rome with ancient determination. Living in Italy, Vedder was familiar with the archeaological remnants of Cumae and it was natural that the ancient prophetess should feature in his visionary art. He rendered this image in other forms too. The painter was completed in Rome is 1876. He made the following drawing in 1872:

Here is another of his paintings on the subject of the Cumae Sybill:

Perhaps his most famous and arresting image, again prophetic and symbiline in spirit, is the following:

It is entitled Listening to the Sphinx or else The Questioner of the Sphinx. It is often reproduced in various contexts today, sometimes erroneously with the title Ozymandiaz after the poems by Horace Smith and Percy Shelley. It is remarkable in the way that it shows a further motivation in the orientalist spirit - a need and a willingness to listen to the distant past, as against the arrogant ignorance of modernity. Europeans turned to the East in search of the ancient and the authentic, as a reaction to modernity. This painting by Mr Vedder is one of the most powerful and haunting renderings of such a spirit. It was this spirit that led Vedder to Egypt on a journey up the Nile on a traditional Egyptian houseboat from December 1889 to April 1890, just as it has led countless others to seek some whisper, some omen, from Egyptian antiquity.

The image and the idea of the sphinx reoccurs in his work in the same way as the sibyl. Here is one study made after his Egyptian sojourn:

And here is a further example entitled The Sphinx on the Seashore:

He left a detailed visual record of his Egyptian travels, not only in completed paintings but in a large number of sketches. An example:

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There are too many great and wonderful works by this artist for us to consider even the most notable of them here. The following are a few that stand out in the present writer's estimation, but there are many others: