Arts and Letters

Vedder has written his own story in his Digressions of V and happily forestalled his obituarist. It is impossible to be funereal in reading that story for it is full of humor, gaiety, and caprice. It wanders, rambles, digresses delightfully, and breaks off just when you expect him to say something serious about Rome and Raphael and academic drawing. He omits—how much he omits!—about his art. But then we have the art itself to supplement the Digressions. If it were not so, if we held by the story alone, we might receive an inadequate impression of the man. He smiles all through the book, but he smiles not at all in his art. The characters in his pictures are as world-worn as the Sibyls and Prophets on the Sistine ceiling, as sorrow-laden as Rossetti's Blessed Damozel, as Burne-Jones's Angel of the Annunciation.

Does that mean that Vedder was another Thomas Hood—smiling without but within consumed by sadness? By no means. He was one man socially and another man artistically. In dealing with the world he preferred to use the social convention. Everyone, at his club, liked his good humor, his appropriate stories, his unique personality. But painting a picture was another matter. That called for serious, sober reflection. He shut the door, took counsel of the Muses, the Fates, the Sibyls, and let slip his romantic imagination. One gets from the Digressions little idea of this except as, now and then, he drops a casual remark that suggests what went on behind the door. He was poetic and romantic from his boyhood. When, as a student in Sherburne, he went sketching he "sought for lofty granite peaks catching the last rays of the sun, for hills convent-crowned or castles on abrupt cliffs frowning down on peaceful abbeys below." He tells us: "I was always looking for things with a tinge of romance in them," and "I had been reading Tennyson and my mind was full of the gleaming Excalibur." And still further on: "I always try to embody my moods in some picture."

This paper trail of quotations leads straight to Vedder's studio and suggests the young artist and his early art. Some of us are not so young that we cannot remember the talk that went the rounds concerning Vedder's Lair of the Sea Serpent, his Questioner of the Sphinx, and his Lost Mind. They had a weird imagination, a touch of the uncanny, that caught the public fancy. Even down into the early eighties there was discussion and explanation of those pictures. Who and what was the personified Lost Mind? What was the Questioner asking the Sphinx? Was the Sea Serpent really painted from a large eel? Vedder says they were all done out of his head—his poetic, romantic head. It cannot be doubted. As a young man he was influenced by Doré's work and his pictures of the Roc's Egg and the Fisherman and the Genii bear witness to it. His imagination at this time was the most attractive quality of his art. That it was more literary than artistic did not matter. The public loved it, praised Vedder, and hailed him as a genius. "I was proud while this first glimmer of Fame lasted. It soon wore off and I have never been proud since." He was to reach higher than serpents and sphinxes, though the swirl of the one and the mystery of the other were to remain with his art to the end.

This was about 1864 and Vedder was twenty-eight. He was born in Varick Street, New York, in 1836. He was not a Yankee, as is often supposed, but a Dutchman of the Dutch. His boyhood was passed in New York. At seven he was taken to Cuba, then to Schenectady, and so backward and forward several times. His early education must have been limited. As a boy he had the humor for drawing and he was encouraged in this by his mother who wished him to be an artist. His first start was in an architect's office, and after that he studied for some time with T. H. Matteson of Sherburne. At twenty he went to Paris and was in the Atelier Picot for eight months. That seems to have been the extent of his professional training. The rest he got by study of the masters. After Paris he went to Rome and Florence, staying in the latter city four years, meeting many persons of the Landor-Browning set and encountering various art influences. He speaks of talks with Inchbold about the art of the Pre-Raphaelites, thinks had he been born in England he might have been one of the P.R.B. The romance, the sentiment, the melancholy of the Pre-Raphaelites quite caught his fancy. And then he came back to New York and found the Civil War and hard times. He took a room in Beekman Street, and, quite unknown, started the struggle for recognition, now such a familiar part of artist-biography. It was then and there that he painted the Lair of the Sea Serpent, the Lost Mind, the Questioner of the Sphinx. These pictures shown at the exhibitions of the National Academy of Design soon brought him into notice and placed him above want, though he records that the Sea Serpent picture—the most effective of the three—was sold for the modest sum of $300.

In 1865, with the Civil War at an end—Vedder had tried to enlist but was rejected because of a defective arm—he started again for Paris. He stayed there (with trips to Brittany and England) for a year, and then went to Rome where he remained for the rest of his life, barring return visits to America, and a latter-day residence at Capri. Rome seemed to appeal to him, to be his proper environment, and to furnish him suggestion and even inspiration. It was the city of romance, the Popes had lent it authority and the painters austerity, and Vedder was still devoted to such things. He was also reaching out towards the mysterious. "It delights me to tamper and potter with the unknowable." He had been much impressed by the drawings of William Blake and now in Rome he must have been mightily moved by the ceiling of Michelangelo. He does not say so in his book and there is nothing in his art that can be pointed out as directly emanating from Michelangelo, and yet there is the same feeling of mystery and weirdness in the drawings for Omar Khayyam as in the Sistine ceiling.

The Rubáiyát drawings will probably always be considered Vedder's masterpiece. The poetry of Omar, as paraphrased by FitzGerald, was particularly appealing to him. It had to do with "the unknowable," it was a study in the mysteries, and it had a swing of sound that seemed to translate itself into a swirl of line. It fitted Vedder to a nicety and yet taxed his ingenuity to the utmost. The Rubáiyát was lofty poetry and the illustrator had to hitch his wagon to a star. But who shall now say which flew at the greater height—Omar or Vedder? How well the illustrator met and supplemented the poet! His work was well thought, well wrought, and well brought. It was magnificent. And if today there is no disposition to question the comparative worth of poem and illustration it is due perhaps to the fact that the two blend together and cannot be thought of as things apart. Vedder may have come to some fame through Omar's poetry, but it can be said also that Vedder gave a new lease of life to the Rubáiyát.

At any rate, in these drawings he showed the stuff that was in him. His early work carried almost wholly by its literary or illustrative subject and its sense of the uncanny or the supernatural. The decorative in line or color or composition is not very apparent in the Lost Mind, the Roc's Egg, and the Questioner of the Sphinx. But the decorative in the Omar drawings is most marked. Each sheet is arranged as a Japanese would arrange flowers in a vase; the figures are swung into place with beautiful outlines; the borders supplement and complement with profound grace. How rhythmical the network of lines that run and interplay throughout the pattern!

The drawings were done on grey paper with black and white crayons. How decorative they are, with not a touch of color in them, and yet with the suggestion of color all through them. One wonders where Vedder got all this profound artistic knowledge. How did he learn to draw and model so well? How did he learn to see things all of a piece, do them all of a piece, hold a whole series together as a piece? He was contemporary with La Farge, Inness, Homer Martin, Winslow Homer. Practically speaking, all of them were self-made and self-taught. They eked out their meagre technical training by study of the great masters, but their principal reliance was upon themselves. Vedder was fortunate in being in Rome, in contact with great art, but when all is said and done the fact remains that his art is overwhelmingly Vedderesque—the expression of his own individuality. The Vedder of the Omar drawings is the Vedder of the Lair of the Sea Serpent, only he had arrived at maturity in the Omar and to his early imagination he now brought a very high artistic quality. The two together place him on a pedestal, in his own peculiar niche, and from that lofty place he will not be dislodged.

I cannot speak of Vedder as a friend or companion because I knew him only as a casual acquaintance. Once or twice I met him in Rome, but we got no further than passing the time of day. Every one spoke highly of him, loved his frank genial personality, and to this day men continue to talk about him at his club and elsewhere; but I never was so fortunate as to be in his charmed circle. Nor can I speak about him as an Academician. He was elected a member of the Academy in 1908 but during his fifteen years of membership he lived in Italy and took no active part in the proceedings of the body. Still it was a satisfaction to know that his name was on the rolls. He was an honor to the Academy, for he has always been an outstanding figure in American art. There is no reason why his success should not be our pride.