Born in New York City, Elihu Vedder was known as a painter of many esoteric subjects and was a leading symbolistic painter whose post-Civil War work evokes melancholy and tragedy. With the publication of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, his illustrations set high standards for artist designed books.

He spent his youth in Schenectady, New York, studied art in New York City and Paris and then spent four years in Florence, Italy. Penniless, he returned to New York at the start of the Civil War and turned to commercial art including sketches for Vanity Fair magazine and diagrams for instructing people in the use of dumbbells. At the end of the war, he left the United States and spent the remaining fifty-eight years of hi...