Elihu Vedder and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

The Glessners assembled more than 8,000 books for the libraries in their Prairie Avenue and New Hampshire homes. Among the most distinctive volumes is a folio-size edition of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, designed and illustrated by the American artist Elihu Vedder in 1883-1884. The book received rave reviews upon its release, secured Vedder’s reputation as an artist, and provided him with financial security for the rest of his life. In this article, we will explore Vedder’s career, the creation of the Rubaiyat, how it came into the Glessner library, and their ongoing interest in the artist.

Elihu Vedder
Vedder was born in New York City on February 26, 1836, to first cousins Elihu (Sr.) and Elizabeth Vedder. By Elihu’s mid-teens he showed promise as an artist, his mother actively supporting his intentions; his father was less convinced. He studied with the American artist Tompkins Harrison Matteson in New York City before heading to Paris to study with Francois-Edouard Picot, who had been a recipient of the Prix de Rome scholarship and a student of Jacques-Louis David.

In 1858, Vedder traveled to Italy where he remained for two years, and it transformed his life, being deeply inspired by Italian Renaissance painting as well as the landscape, which he frequently depicted in his paintings. He befriended fellow painter Giovanni Costa, with whom he traveled extensively through the Italian countryside, until Vedder’s father cut off his allowance.

Returning to the United States at the start of the Civil War, he earned money as a commercial illustrator and quickly became involved in Greenwich Village’s first “Bohemian hangout” at Pfaff’s beer cellar. It was here he befriended Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and many others known as the Pfaffians, the start of long-standing friendships with some of the most creative and intellectual minds of the period. 

At the conclusion of the Civil War, he returned to his beloved Italy. He frequently traveled to England, being influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, and befriended Simeon Solomon, a prominent painter of the movement known for his depiction of Jewish life. Vedder occasionally returned to the United States, and for a period of time designed objects for Louis Comfort Tiffany, as well as a bronze statue, The Boy, which Tiffany placed in a fountain at his Long Island estate, Laurelton Hall. In the late 1890s, Vedder designed a mosaic of Minerva and a series of murals depicting various aspects of government, to adorn the Reading Room of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Best remembered today for his monochromatic accompaniments for the Rubaiyat (he disliked the term illustrations), he produced a significant amount of artwork that is difficult to classify, although he is often referenced as a Symbolist painter. As Joshua C. Taylor noted in Perceptions and Evocations: The Art of Elihu Vedder (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979):

“Vedder has been remembered for several different accomplishments but rarely as a unified artistic personality. His extraordinary illustrations to accompany Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, published in 1884, are an early and persuasive lesson in the compelling evocative powers of a decorative style. His disarmingly simple, richly colored glimpses of the Italian landscape, however, celebrate the pleasures of direct perception. His work seems to be rooted firmly in two opposing traditions, each revolutionary in its way in the nineteenth century. Yet probably the most revolutionary aspect of Vedder was his refusal to take sides, to admit that the perceptual and visionary were at odds with each other.”

Of his personality, Taylor, as co-author with Jane Dillenberger of The Hand and the Spirit: Religious Art in America 1700-1900 (University Art Museum, Berkeley, CA, 1972), wrote:

“His personality emerges as a compound of extroverted vigor, volatility, jocularity, and flirtatiousness, with an introverted fascination with dreams, a preoccupation with death, a tendency toward melancholia, and an appetite for the macabre.”

Elihu Vedder died in 1923 at the age of 86 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. 

Omar Khayyam, Edward FitzGerald, and the origins of the Rubaiyat
Omar Khayyam, known as the “Astronomer-Poet of Persia” lived from 1048 to 1131 A.D. He achieved modern recognition when the English writer and poet Edward FitzGerald (1809-1883) completed his translation of a selection of quatrains (rubaiyat) in the late 1850s. The authenticity of the poetry attributed to Khayyam is uncertain, as during his lifetime he was known as an astronomer and mathematician. It was not until a biography was written decades after his death that we find the first references to his having written poetry. Of the 2,000 or so quatrains attributed to him, scholars vary widely as to how many of them truly came from Khayyam, most agreeing that less than 200 can be authenticated. 

FitzGerald is best remembered today for his English translation of the Rubaiyat. He began studying Persian literature with Professor Edward Byles Cowell at the University of Oxford in 1853. Four years later, Cowell discovered a set of Persian quatrains by Khayyam in the Asiatic Society library in Calcutta, which he sent to FitzGerald, who completed his initial translation later that year. In January 1859, he privately printed 250 copies, but the work remained largely unknown until being discovered by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1861 and soon after by the author and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne (of whom Rossetti later painted a portrait). 

A second, greatly revised edition was published by FitzGerald in 1868, with further editions in 1872 and 1879 and a posthumous edition in 1889. The third edition was the first to contain the now standard 101 quatrains, and the first American edition of 1878 was a reprint of this version. William Morris became enamored with the work, producing his own version in the 1870s, with the text in his hand, supplemented by illustrations by Edward Burne-Jones (shown below). In time, “the slim volume was handed from artist to artist, and it served as a touchstone for the spiritual and poetic in a time of strident materialism.” By the 1890s, more than two hundred editions had been produced, resulting in total sales exceeding two million copies, the formation of Omar Khayyam clubs throughout the English-speaking world, and the rise of a fin de siècle cult of the Rubaiyat.

FitzGerald openly admitted that he took considerable liberties with the source material. In correspondence to Cowell in 1858 and 1859, he wrote:

“My translation will interest you from its form, and also in many respects in its detail: very un-literal as it is. Many quatrains are mashed together: and something lost, I doubt, of Omar’s simplicity, which is so much a virtue in him.

“I suppose very few people have ever taken such Pains in Translation as I have: though certainly not to be literal. But at all Costs, a Thing must live: with a transfusion of one’s own worse[FP2]  Life if one can’t retain the Originals better. Better a live Sparrow than a stuffed Eagle.”

Vedder’s Rubaiyat

The 55 drawings in pencil, ink, chalk, and watercolor on tinted paper, comprising Vedder’s edition of the Rubaiyat, were completed over a ten month period from May 1883 to March 1884 while in Rome, as noted on the signature page below.

His signature, always depicted as an asymmetrical V, is explained in the end notes to the volume:

“If an explanation of the artist’s signature is demanded, why may it not be taken as representing the high and low notes, the light and shade in which this work is done? Hastily plucked and rudely fashioned, this double pipe is (the artist believes) yet capable of producing some music worthy of the listening ear.”

Vedder also designed the cover, the lining papers on the inside of the front and back covers, and the distinctive lettering. The two sides of his artistic expression are evident, one description of an exhibition of the original drawings noting how “he reconciled the critics who called for accurate depiction of observed reality with those who argued for feeling and emotion over objective form.”

He dedicated the book to his wife, the former Caroline Rosekrans, (the daughter of a New York Supreme Court judge), to whom he was united in marriage in 1869 in her hometown of Glens Falls, New York. 

Just as FitzGerald had taken liberties in translating the quatrains, Vedder took additional liberties in rearranging them in order to express what he felt were the three stages of existence explored in the text – happiness and youth, death and darkness, and rebirth. Examining the details in the drawings, one finds everything from traditional Christian symbols and classical figures to mystical imagery of Vedder’s invention. A prominent device is the “cosmic swirl,” first seen on the front cover, and repeated throughout the volume. Vedder, in his end notes, explains:

“The swirl which appears here, and is an ever-recurring feature in the work, represents the gradual concentration of the elements which combine in life: the sudden pause, through the reversal of the movement, which marks the instant of life; then the gradual, ever-widening dispersion again into the primitive elements.”

The first edition of the book was released on November 8, 1884, and sold out in just six days. A deluxe limited edition with a stamped leather cover cost $100; a regular edition with cloth cover was $25. The book was published by Houghton, Mifflin and Company, a prominent Boston-based publisher that held the rights to the literary works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. It was printed at its Riverside Press, “one of the model printing-offices in America,” noted for its unusual practice of employing male and female compositors, who worked side by side.

The book was praised as a masterwork of American art, and Vedder secured his place as the master American artist. Critics noted that he set the standard for the artist-designed book by creating all of its elements.

The quality of the reproduced drawings was also praised, a review in the January 1885 issue of The Atlantic noting:

“The mechanical execution of the book is worthy of a word. The plates seem to reproduce the drawings with little or no loss, and in one or two cases with some trifling gain, which now and then follows reduction and translation into one color. This adaptation of an improved gelatine-printing method, made directly from original drawings, is a new feature in American illustrated bookmaking, and has been tried here for the first time in large and difficult plates. If the promise made by this addition to our illustrative methods is kept, we may hope to see other magnificent pictures contribute intimately to literary enjoyment.”

The Rubaiyat comes to Chicago
The book was offered for sale in Chicago within a few weeks of its sell-out release in Boston. The “Literature” column in the December 6, 1884 edition of the Chicago Tribune led with a lengthy review of the book, which opened:

“Originality is earnestly striven after by the artists of today; but no one of them has more of that distinguishing quality, or attains it more easily, than Mr. Elihu Vedder. It is so much his nature to be original that the after-expression of any artistic idea passed through the alembic of his brain is certain not only to bear the impress of a most vigorous imagination, but to be notably different from the form that it would assume if presented by any other human being. In the “Rubaiyat” of Omar Khayyam he has found a congenial theme for the exercise of his genius; and the result is a series of designs which, for refinement of conception, dignity and breadth of treatment, combined with wonderful grace and beauty of expression, is worthy to rank with the highest achievements of modern art.”

The 1884 advertisement above is for S. A. Maxwell & Co., located at 134-136 Wabash Avenue. This was the Jewelers' Building, completed in 1882 from designs by Adler & Sullivan. The current address is 15-17 S. Wabash Avenue.

By February 1885, Vedder's original drawings for the Rubaiyat had come to Chicago for exhibition at the Art Institute, at the time located in its first building at the southwest corner of Michigan Avenue and Van Buren Street. The drawings, which measured approximately 13 by 17 inches, were hugely popular, leading the Art Institute to open the exhibit for free on Saturday, February 28, between the hours of 9:00am and 10:00pm. Frances Glessner would have almost certainly seen the exhibit, as she was taking her son George to the Institute each Saturday morning for a drawing class.

The Glessners received their copy of the Rubaiyat as a Christmas gift from George in 1892 – perhaps a remembrance of his viewing the 1885 exhibit with his mother? Her journal entry for Christmas Day notes “George gave us Vedder’s illustrated Rubaiyat.” The folio-size regular edition with cloth cover cost $25, the equivalent of $735 in today’s dollars. (When John Glessner died in 1936, the book was valued at $5 in the estate appraisal; today, copies sell in the $1,000 to $1,500 range).

 

Each leaf measures 12 inches wide by 15-1/2 inches tall and is printed on a heavy paper which is mounted on linen guards gathered at the spine. The leaves are arranged in pairs which face each other. The 101 quatrains are contained within 47 plates, with additional drawings used for the end papers, title page, and notes pages. The book does not contain a copyright date, but the title page lists both Houghton, Mifflin and Company of Boston and Bernard Quaritch of London as publishers. Vedder’s colophon for the Riverside Press (shown below) faces the dedication page to his wife.

The Digressions of V

 In 1910, Vedder published his autobiography entitled The Digressions of V, with the notation “Written for his own fun and that of his friends,” and the added stanza:

“Somewhat o’ershadowed by great names,
A feeble plant he tries to rear;
It is not nourished by great aims
Nor yet retarded by much fear;
His aims if any are but these,
To be remembered and to please.”

It, too, was published by Houghton, Mifflin and Company at its Riverside Press. The Glessners purchased their copy for $6.00, confirmed by the penciled notation inside the back cover inserted by the bookseller, A. C. McClurg and Company. They placed the book in their library at The Rocks, their summer estate in New Hampshire, as noted by the bookplate inside the front cover.

A review in the Chicago Tribune noted:

“Very often when a book is introduced with the remark that the author was induced to write it because friends asked him to, we may prepare for something that the world would willingly let die. It is not so in the case of Mr. Vedder. His friends knew what they were about when they urged him to write this book. It is quite unconventional, as Vedder’s art work is certainly unconventional.

“Mr. Vedder has made a beautiful book and certainly original. He apparently attended to the typographical arrangement himself, for it is artistic and characteristic – just the sort of a book one would expect Mr. Vedder to write and publish.”

Vedder dedicated his book to Grace Ellery Channing Stetson, an American writer and poet who lived in Rome, and helped him edit and compile the autobiography. The dedication page, shown below, depicts the four elements (from upper left) – water, air, fire, and earth.

 

The book includes a chapter covering the period in which the drawings for the Rubaiyat were created. Vedder noted how the book came about:

“On one of my trips home, seeing that other people were making books, I thought – Why not make one myself? And of course Omar came into my mind, and the more I thought of it, the more the idea pleased me. . . In Boston, Mr. Houghton listened to my scheme, and asked, “But who and where is this Omar?” I said that was natural; he was too near; he only published the poem. To make a long story short, he agreed to bring out the book, and on the way back to Rome I thought it all out. In three weeks I had divided the verses into groups and settled on the subjects of the drawings, and commenced making them. I was somewhat wise also: I did not begin at the beginning and go through, but dipped in here and there through the book, so that they should not begin well and peter out, or begin ill and improve, but were kept as even as moods and circumstances would permit; but they boiled out, and I kept the fire hot, and they were all done. . . The drawings were all made in a studio in the Villa Strohl Fern outside the Porta del Popolo, Rome.

“To those who object to the work, - and there are those who do, - I will only say that it is selling yet – a poor argument, but it must suffice.”

(Note: The Villa Strohl Fern was erected a few years before Vedder created his drawings there. It is located on the grounds of the Villa Borghese in Rome. Alfred Wilhelm Strohl, an exile from Alsace, purchased the large plot of land, creating elaborate gardens and constructing the main villa and multiple smaller villas and studio facilities, which were leased to numerous artists through the years. The word “fern” translates as “far away,” emphasizing Strohls’ exile.)

Vedder’s artwork today

The complete set of original drawings for the Rubaiyat was acquired by purchase and gift by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1978 from Elizabeth W. Henderson, in memory of her husband, Francis Tracy Henderson. In 2008, the museum organized an exhibition of the drawings that toured several museums around the country.

The Art Institute of Chicago owns several works by Vedder, including a figure study for the Rubaiyat, retouched in 1911 (not currently on exhibit) and one of four copies of The Boy, a bronze fountain statue made in collaboration with sculptor Charles Keck. It is the same as the statue that stood on Louis Comfort Tiffany’s Long Island estate and can be viewed in the Art of the Americas Gallery 161. Paintings include The Fates Gathering in the Stars (Gallery 161) and Storm in Umbria (Gallery 174), the latter a gift of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel M. Nickerson in 1900. It would have originally hung in their Erie Street home, now the Driehaus Museum.

The Glessners’ copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is a visually stunning reminder of the collection of books they gathered during the decades they resided in their Prairie Avenue home. It reflects their discriminating taste, sophisticated abilities as book collectors, and their interest in the newest trends in art and publishing.