VEDDER, ELIHU (1836-1923), American painter, was born in New York city, Feb. 26,1836. He studied under the genre and historical painter Tompkins H. Matteson (1813-84), 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 distinguished place in the art world. Important decorative work
came at a later date, more particularly 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. He died in Rome, Jan. 29, 1923. A few days before his death, his book, Doubt and Other Things, was published.