Elihu Vedder: Voyage on the Nile
Excerpted From A View of the Nile, in Imagination and Reality Dec. 2, 2011 by Sylvanie GoldAround the time Albert Bierstadt painted Looking Down Yosemite Valley and Edouard Manet exhibited Le DÃ©jeuner sur l Herbe ( Luncheon on the Grass ), the American artist Elihu Vedder, who had never visited Egypt, created a brooding, emphatically plain canvas, The Questioner of the Sphinx.Vedder's drawings and sketches, however, are another story, and the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers has put together a winning little exhibition that forcefully makes this point. The painter we meet in Elihu Vedder: Voyage on the Nile is looser, more relaxed and more spontaneous than the one we think we know from his more formal work. And why not? He was on a four-month cruise, part of an all-expenses-paid trip to Egypt.The show includes several dozen of these lively drawings, in pastel, pencil, chalk and charcoal. Working on different kinds of paper, sometimes stacking several images on a single sheet as he started to run out, Vedder rendered windblown trees on Feb. 12, an intense blue sky on Feb. 16, ancient rock quarries at Gebel el-Silsila (known to him as Silsilis) on Feb. 26, a glowing field of green wheat on March 6, the limestone cliffs of Gebel Sheikh el-Haridi (he calls it Shegk El Haradu) on March 26.The excellent catalog for the Hudson River exhibit suggests that Vedder intended to use his Egyptian drawings as the basis for yet another illustrated book. But the pictures on the walls make you wonder. Images of monuments are few and far between, and his first encounter with the Great Sphinx at Giza I was simply struck dumb, he wrote to his wife is timidly rendered from behind. The locals and their customs are observed from a distance, even when the artist goes ashore for a camel excursion (which he loved but which left him sorer and sorer than he d ever been).Such choices hardly seem appropriate for a travel book meant for his public; they seem more relevant as private souvenirs. Experienced together and this is the first time this has been possible since the drawings were dispersed after the death of Vedder s daughter these pictures feel like a long, lovely tracking shot, the kind of memento tourists bring back in their video cameras today. In his discursive 1910 autobiography, The Digressions of V.: Written for His Own Fun and That of His Friends, he described the Egyptian countryside as beautiful, simple and grand. Those words fit his pictures, too. --New York Times