Date of Award

Spring 2026

Degree Type

Thesis

Advisor(s)

Dr. Melanie Woody Nguyen

Second Advisor

Dr. Kimberly Dennis

Third Advisor

Dr. Susan Libby

Abstract

This thesis examines the artwork of prolific American artist Elihu Vedder (1836-1924), utilizing his eccentric yet comprehensive autobiography The Digressions of V (1910) as its grounding source. Despite enjoying a successful, sixty-year career, Vedder has posthumously sunk into relative obscurity in American art history. I postulate that Vedder’s artwork has been largely overlooked because of his breadth in style, creating an inability to classify his art within a single movement. Vedder drew upon the creative traditions of Romanticism, Aestheticism, Symbolism, and greatly admired the art and philosophy of the British Pre-Raphaelites. In addition to artistic variety, Vedder also lived most of his adult life as an expatriate in Italy and travelled extensively, lending an assortment of regional differences to his works. Throughout this dissertation, I triangulate his images, biography, and geographical context to expound his artistic practice over the first two decades of his career. Though stylistically diverse, it is evident that Vedder’s artwork remained thematically consistent. The artist, both fascinated and dismayed by Death, featured this theme in almost every work of art he created. The paintings included in this paper explicate the theme of mortality into scenes that are characteristic of works by Vedder: they are set in imaginary locations conceived from his dreams, and they employ figures from global mythology and folklore to symbolize Vedder’s emotions and experiences with incidents occurring within his personal life and outside of it. Through each case study, I argue that Vedder’s porous relationship with his art is his attempt at making sense of the turmoil and loss he, as well as society at large, experienced at the end of the nineteenth century.

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