?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000
ELIHU VEDDER Lazarus Rising from the Tomb.
Charcoal on board, circa 1899. 330x442 mm; 13x17 3/8 inches. Signed in charcoal, lower left recto.
This is a study for the same-titled oil, 1899, now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. There is also an oil study of the subject in the collection of the Speed Art Museum, Louisville.
Vedder (1836-1923) was primarily known as a book illustrator, poet and American symbolist painter. He started drawing as a child, selling his first painting by the age of 19. In 1856, Vedder had traveled to Europe, where he settled in Florence and studied drafstmanship and gained an appreciation for antiquity and the Italian Renaissance masters. His travels to Europe were halted, however, when his father, a prominent New York dentist, cut off his allowance.
At the start of the Civil War, Vedder returned to New York and began to make a living by undertaking commissions for commercial illustrations. He became involved with a circle of bohemian artists and writers known as the Pfaff's Coffee House Group, which included literary and artistic figures such as Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and William Morris Hunt. His works from this period are notable for their romantic imagery and Oriental influences.
By the mid-1860s, Vedder had become a sought-after American artist/illustrator, and with his rising commercial success moved back to Italy and, in 1869, married fellow expatriate Caroline Rosekrans. He remained in Italy for the rest of his life, returning to the United States occasionally to fulfill commissions, such as the hallway of the Reading Room of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., and designing glassware, mosaics and statuettes for Tiffany & Co., New York. He visited England many times during the last two decades of the 1800s and became influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites and their spiritually-charged paintings.
