- A Nile Journey
- The Voyage and Drawings
- New Museum Catalogue
Over 120 years ago, the land of Egypt, seen from a boat coursing the Nile, seduced Elihu Vedder into sketching the desert and its horizon, as mile after mile scrolled past.
In an Egyptian winter, from December 1889 to April 1890, this American artist produced nearly 200 drawings and a diary to record the passing scenery and the places he stopped to sketch. Later, Vedder contemplated making his Nile Journey drawings into a book, but after his death the drawings would appear scattered and only in museums and private collections. Elihu Vedder: Voyage On the Nile, organized by the Hudson River Museum, brings together for the first time the paintings and drawings from the journey that, added to its artistic contribution, also augured a new industry — tourism, packaged for the western traveler.
Few came to Egypt’s exotic experience with as much expectation as Elihu Vedder. For over 25 years his painting The Questioner of the Sphinx had gripped the public’s imagination. Looming and solitary on desert sands, the sphinx is implored by a desolate man, “What is life’s meaning?”
Thanks to George Corliss, scion of the Corliss steam engine family, a mature Vedder, at the height of his career, was offered an expense free tour on the Nile. The land Vedder had plumbed in his imagination would finally be real to his pen and brush.
On board a dahabeyeh, a traditional Egyptian houseboat, Vedder, with friends and crew of 14, sailed past pyramids at Dashur, rode a camel at Wadi Halfa, endured hot and cold, rain and sandstorms, ran aground on a sandbank, and returned safely and jubilantly to Cairo on April 4. The artist recalls the trip, all too brief for him, in his autobiography The Digressions of V, “I saw Egypt…my interest and liking, could I have lived there a short time, would have turned to love…”
A deep fascination with ancient Egypt has run through western culture for more than 200 years. It spawned Egypt-mania after Egypt-mania, affecting design in the 19th century and the 20th, and a string of Hollywood movies driven by stars Theda Bara to Claudette Colbert to Elizabeth Taylor. That fascination propelled late 19th-century tourists to leave their Euro-centered homes to cross deserts and rivers in search of Egypt’s monuments and vast spaces. Vedder, among them, saw the Great Sphinx, saying, “I was struck dumb. . . the ineffable softness and richness of the color tempt one to try to describe that which could only be represented in painting & even then but faintly.” Vedder’s travel brought him to real Egyptian sights and confirmed, too, his remarkable “young vision of an Egypt where time passes endlessly, witnessed by a dominating sphinx before whom an Arab crouches. Just as a 1863 critic noted, “We appreciate the hungry look of the Arab; we know that he will kneel there until the Sphinx starves him to death.”
Accompanying the exhibition is an illustrated catalogue, Elihu Vedder: Voyage On the Nile, the best and latest survey of Vedder’s artwork of Egypt that can be currently established. In it, Vedder’s visual travelogue is seen through the experiences of American artists and tourists in late 19th-century Egypt. Essays are by noted art historian Linda Ferber, Egyptologist Floyd Lattin; and, the Museum’s Chief Curator of Collections, Laura Vookles. Many of Vedder’s drawings, in widespread locations and sparsely published, were photographed for the first time for this publication. Excerpts from Vedder’s Travel Diary and letters are also included.
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Elihu Vedder: Voyage on the Nile |
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