1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Vedder, Elihu

VEDDER, ELIHU (1836–), American artist, was born in New York City on the 26th of February 1836. He studied under the genre and historical painter Tompkins H. Matteson (1813-1884), at Sherburne, N.Y., later under Picot, in Paris, and then, in 1857-61, in Italy. After 1867 he lived in Rome, making occasional visits to America. He was elected to full membership in the National Academy of Design, New York, in 1865. He devoted himself to the painting of genre pictures, which, however, attracted only modest attention until the publication, in 1884, of his illustrations to the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam; these immediately gave him a high place in the art world. Important decorative work came later, notably the painting symbolizing the art of the city of Rome, in the Walker Art Gallery of Bowdoin College, Maine, and the five lunettes (in the entrance hall) symbolical of government, and the mosaic “Minerva” in the Congressional Library at Washington. Among his better-known pictures are: “Lair of the Sea Serpent,” in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; “Young Marsyas,” “Cumaean Sibyl,” “Nausicaa,” in the collection of J. Pierpont Morgan; and “Genii and Fisherman,” in the collection of Martin Brimmer, Boston.