The Tile Club: Camaraderie and American Plein-Air Painting The Tile Club | Page 126

Elihu Vedder
American, 1836–1923
“I am not a mystic,” Elihu Vedder writes in his autobiography, but
“I have a strong tendency to see in things more than meets the
eye. This tendency, which unduly cultivated might lead me into
the extravagant…has enabled me at times to tread with safety
that narrow path lying between the Sublime and the Ridicu-
lous…” (Vedder, 408). Vedder is best known for his symbolist
works, which explore these subjective dreamlike states.
Born in New York City, Vedder first trained under genre
painter Tompkins Harrison Matteson. In 1856, he studied with
François-Édouard Picot in Paris, and a year later, he was a pupil
of Raffaello Bonaituti in Florence. By the start of the Civil War,
however, Vedder was forced to return home as his father had put
an end to his yearly allowance. Unable to fight in the war due to
a childhood hunting injury, Vedder took classes at the National
Academy of Design and took up illustration work for Vanity Fair
and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. After the war, Vedder
married Caroline Rosekrans, and they settled in Italy.
During a trip to New York in 1879, Vedder was introduced
by William Merritt Chase to the members of the Tile Club. He
modestly wrote to his wife on December 4: “I painted on a piece
of canvas, I fear very badly for me, but things did not work and I
was really frightened, but will show them some day what I really
can do” (Soria, 138). During the following years, Vedder designed
stained glass windows for Louis Comfort Tiffany, illustrated Ed-
ward FitzGerald’s translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
(1884), and received a commission for a series of murals and
mosaic designs for the Library of Congress (1896). The last twen-
ty years of Vedder’s life were spent in Italy painting and writing
his autobiography The Digressions of V (1910), and two books of
poems: Miscellaneous Moods in Verse (1914), and Doubt and Other
Things (1922).
120 THE TILE CLUB: Camaraderie and American Plein-Air Painting
Elihu Vedder, November 7, 1910, glass negative, 5 x 7 in.
or smaller, George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of
Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-gg-
bain-05394
REFERENCES:
Dearinger, David Bernard. ed. Paintings and Sculpture in the
Collection of the National Academy of Design. Volume 1,
1826–1925. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2004.
“Elihu Vedder.” The Aldine 9, no. 8 (1879): 249.
Mather Jr., Frank Jewett. Estimates in Art. Series II. Sixteen Es-
says on American Painters of the Nineteenth Century. Freeport,
NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970.
Montgomery, Walter, ed. American Art and American Art
Collections: Essays on Artistic Subjects by the Best Art Writers,
Fully Illustrated with Etchings, Photoetchings, Photogravures,
Phototypes, and Engravings on Steel and Wood by the Most
Celebrated Artists. Vol. I. Boston: E. W. Walker & Co., 1889.
Soria, Regina. Elihu Vedder: American Visionary Artist in Rome