Vedder, Elihu

Vedder, Elihu, 1836–1923, American painter, illustrator, and author, b. New York City, studied in Paris. From 1867 his permanent residence was Rome. He often used romantic landscape as a setting for allegorical images. Among his works are The African Sentinel and The Pleiades (Metropolitan Mus.) and The Keeper of the Threshold (Carnegie Inst., Pittsburgh). He is known for his illustrations for Fitzgerald's translation of The Rubaiyat. His symbolic and decorative murals include five lunettes representing good and bad government (Library of Congress). He wrote Digressions of V. (1910), Miscellaneous Moods in Verse (1914), and Doubt and Other Things (1923).

See biography by R. Soria (1975). See also catalog of his works (National Collection of Fine Arts, 1979).

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