ELIHU VEDDER 11836-1923
Cliffs of Volterra, 1860
Oil on panel, 12 X 25" (30.48 x 63.50 cm.)
Signed, lower right
Gift of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 955-0-145

During his long residence in Italy, Elihu Vedder visited not only the usual picturesque Italian sites such as the Roman Campagna and Subiaco but also those such as San Remo, Bordighera, and Capri, not on the traditional nineteenth-century tourist route because of their inaccessibility, but which offered the ruggedness and desolation that Vedder found attractive. From 1858 on he made small oil sketches of local landscape views, keeping most of them because he liked them so much, showing them to friends when they visited, and, on occasion, exhibiting them.1 After his death, his daughter bequeathed them to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which subsequently distributed them to various American museums. Cliffs of Volterra is among the finest of these landscape studies.
On his first visit to Italy from 1858 to 1860, Vedder developed a close relationship with Giovanni (Nino) Costa, who belonged to the Macchiaioli, a group of young Italian painters committed to new developments of plein-air painting. Vedder and Costa traveled together to the hill towns around Tuscany where they painted directly from nature, at times selecting the same subject so as to compare their techniques and results. Costa "delighted in stealing upon Nature in her most intimate moods, taking her by tradintento [treachery]," noted Vedder, referring to the startling landscape sketches in which Costa betrayed traditional standards for natural beauty in landscape painting. Vedder's friendship with Costa seems to have brought him into contact with the Macchiaioli style at an early stage in its formation and prompted his appreciation, unique among American artists, for the innovative naturalism of the Macchiaioli landscape- sketching technique. Using rather broad patches of chalky colors in thick, grainy paint, Vedder began to paint landscapes very different from those of his American colleagues, in which clear geometry, a preference for plain, flat surfaces, and an exaggerated canvas width prevail.
In August, 1860, Vedder accompanied Costa to Volterra, a medieval town of Etruscan origin in Tuscany, southwest of Florence. In a letter to his father Vedder stated, "the extensive views in all directions are the things that interest us most . on one side of the town there is a great ravine and the hillside has been crumbling away in it for centuries ... the gullies and pinnacles left in it by the rain make the [s]cene one of the wildest beauty." He was describing the deeply furrowed clay precipices called Le Balze whose parched, desolate appearance went very much against the stereotypical Italian scenery. Yet Vedder liked this stark, lifeless terrain from the beginning. This trip resulted in two oil sketches: Cliffs of Volterra and another of the same dimensions, Volterra (1860, National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.). For their date, they are astonishingly innovative compositions. Volterra depicts a bird's eye view of the cliffs with the mountains of Carrara visible on the horizon. Cliffs of Volterra, depicted from a lower viewpoint, is daringly truncated at top and bottom, so that sky and foreground are cut off, while the dry cliffs and gullies loom before the viewer. The parched, mountainous landscape became a feature of a number of Vedder's works on which his reputation as a painter of Symbolist fantasies is based. The cliffs of this oil sketch reappear as the background of The Lost Mind (1864-65, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), one of Vedder's most memorable images, whose haunting, disturbing quality comes largely from the inhospitable landscape through which a troubled young woman, dressed in a long cloak, wanders.

DIANA STRAZDES