In this year’s Summer issue of American Art, there are two essays on Elihu Vedder’s Rubáiyát.
Sylvia Yount shows how the fifty-four drawings that Vedder made for the deluxe edition of Edward FitzGerald’s translation —as well as the related paintings and decorative designs inspired by them—reveal Vedder’s deep engagement with the late nineteenth-century Anglo-American Aesthetic movement as both an artistic and a commercial enterprise, aimed at a wide range of viewers and consumers.

Akela Reason explores Vedder’s preoccupation with the mystery of death, a subject he returned to again and again. Death comes in many forms in Vedder’s art—from “all-devouring” sphinxes presiding over desert wastes to the fratricidal conflict of the Old Testament, and devastating medieval plagues.