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The Dancing Girl shares much in common with Vedder’s Girl with a Lute from 1866. Although there is little in the latter painting to suggest a Near Eastern setting, as there is in Dancing Girl, there are several other similarities between the two. In Girl with a Lute, a model dressed in an antique gown stands before a tapestry. She holds a large lute that rests on the floor next to her. Behind her, various decorative elements are arranged on a small table. She gazes pensively down. It was evidently a formula that brought the artist some success, as he sold Girl with a Lute to the art dealers Barry and Co. of Paris the same year he painted it. [1] In those years, Vedder did not always sell paintings with such ease, so his reasons for attempting a similar subject are clear.
Two influences in particular seem to have played a role in the choices that Vedder made for the 1871 Dancing Girl. The first was his interest in oriental subjects. In 1868, the artist had chosen a favorite book from his childhood, The Arabian Nights, as inspiration for his painting The Roc’s Egg. In his autobiography, Vedder himself mentions his fondness for the book of adventure stories. [2] In The Roc’s Egg, Vedder illustrates Sinbad the Sailor’s discovery of an enormous egg laid by a legendary bird called the Roc. Clearly, he found the Near East setting appealing and exotic.
Evidence of this interest, however, is by no means confined to The Roc’s Egg. Vedder’s fascination with the Orient runs as a theme throughout his career, from The Arabian Nights in the 1860s to The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in the 1880s. Several other mid-nineteenth-century Western artists also demonstrated this attraction to oriental settings and subjects. [3] Although artists since the Renaissance had created paintings set in the Near East, the proliferation of the theme in the nineteenth century is remarkable. During that period, Europe strengthened its diplomatic, commercial, and colonial ties to the Near East and North Africa. At the same time, the ease of traveling to those areas improved, and Western artists began visiting the region in greater numbers, paying close attention to its distinctive features. They found the landscape and the cultures both aesthetically rich and seductive. Harem scenes with dancing girls were a popular manifestation of the Orientalist strain, giving artists the opportunity to explore a subject that was sensual, erotic, and visually appealing.
The second factor influencing Vedder’s 1871 painting was likely his 1870 trip to London. There, he came into contact with some of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including John Everett Millais, who visited Vedder at least once in his studio. [4] Certainly, Vedder would have had the opportunity to see Pre-Raphaelite paintings, which often featured women lost in thought, posed alone before highly decorated backgrounds. Dancing Girl also shares with many of those paintings a debt to myth and legend.
Vedder includes one detail that makes this painting a vanitas piece, a painting that expresses ideas about the fragility of life and the inevitability of death. In the lower right corner rests the dancing girl’s wheel of fortune, and its arrow points toward a skull next to his dancing girl, reminding the viewer that such things as youth and beauty are fleeting.
In spite of this sobering detail, the overall effect of the painting is one of sumptuous beauty and exotic appeal. It was a formula that again brought Vedder some success; in her biography of the artist, Regina Soria quotes his wife’s Carrie’s description of the painting’s purchase: “V. painted one day the head, and the next morning in walked Mr. Edmund A. Ward of N.Y. and quietly bought it. …” [5] Indeed, the painting must have remained a family favorite, for it stayed in the Ward family for the next hundred years.
Notes:
[1] Regina Soria, Elihu Vedder: American Visionary Artist in Rome (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970), 50.
[2] Elihu Vedder, The Digressions of V (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910), 55.
[3] See, for example, paintings by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Léon Gérôme, William Holman Hunt, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and John Singer Sargent.
[4] Soria, Elihu Vedder, 71.
[5] Soria, Elihu Vedder, 304.
ProvenanceFrom 1871 to 1970
Edmund A. Ward, New York, purchased from the artist in 1871; his family, by descent. [1]
1970
Vose Galleries, Boston, MA, acquired from private dealer in Maine, July 30, 1970. [2]
1970
Graham Williford, Fairfield, Texas, purchased from Vose Galleries, Boston in September 1970. [3]
Kennedy Galleries, Inc., New York. [4]
To 1984
Barbara B. Millhouse, New York, NY and Winston-Salem, NC, purchased from Kennedy Galleries, Inc., New York. [5]
From 1984
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC, given by Barbara B. Millhouse on December 28, 1984. [6]
Notes:
[1] Kennedy Galleries, Inc. info sheets, object file.
[2] Memo to file, Ellen Kutcher, January 14, 1997.
[3] See note 2.
[4] Joan Durana Provenance Research, c. 1983 and old Reynolda House cover sheet, object file.
[5] See note 4.
[6] Deed of Gift, object file.
Exhibition History1971
American Masters, 18th to 20th Centuries
Kennedy Galleries, Inc., New York, NY (3/10/1971-4/3/1971)
Cat. No. 23
1975
Vedder 1836-1923
Hyde Collection, Glen Falls, NY (6/28/1975-8/31/1975)
1978-1979
Perceptions And Evocations: The Art Of Elihu Vedder
National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (10/13/1978-2/4/1979)
Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY (4/1979-7/8/1979)
Cat. No. 118
1990-1992
American Originals, Selections From Reynolda House Museum Of American Art
The American Federation of Arts
Center for the Fine Arts, Miami, FL (9/22/1990-11/18/1990)
Palm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs, CA (12/16/1990-2/10/1991)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (3/6/1991-5/11/1991)
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN (6/2/1991-7/28/1991)
Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Fort Worth, TX (8/17/1991-10/20/1991)
Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, IL (11/17/1991-1/12/1992)
The Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK (3/1/1992-4/26/1992)
2007
The Art of Dance
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC (4/3/2007-9/16/2007)
2012
Mystical Visions, Divine Revelations: Religion and Spirituality in 19th Century Art
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC (3/31/2012 – 11/25/2012)
Published ReferencesAmerican Masters, 18th to 20th Centuries. New York: Kennedy Galleries, Inc., 1971: 23, no.23.
Millhouse, Barbara B. and Robert Workman. American Originals. New York: Abbeville Press Pubs., 1990: 70-1.
Soria, Regina. Elihu Vedder: American Visionary Artist in Rome. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970: 304, no. 209.
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Reynolda: Her Muses, Her Stories , with contributions by Martha R. Severens and David Park Curry (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Reynolda House Museum of American Art affiliated with Wake Forest University, 2017). pg. 210, 211
DepartmentAmerican Art
Dancing Girl
Artist
Elihu Vedder
(1836 - 1923)
Date1871
Mediumoil on canvas
DimensionsFrame: 52 x 32 5/8 in. (132.1 x 82.9 cm)
Image: 39 x 19 3/8 in. (99.1 x 49.2 cm)
SignedE. Vedder Rome 1871
Credit LineGift of Barbara B. Millhouse
CopyrightPublic domain
Object number1984.2.10
DescriptionElihu Vedder’s Dancing Girl from 1871 demonstrates the way the artist absorbed and synthesized various influences to create a harmonious whole. In the painting, a fair-haired model stands holding an elaborately decorated tambourine. She is placed before a luxurious tapestry depicting lush vegetation and exotic animals, including lions, camels, and deer. She is richly attired in a Renaissance-style gown, but she raises her skirts to reveal Turkish-style leggings and slippers, suggesting that the setting is a harem. Surrounding her are various elements for entertainment: a wheel for predicting fortunes for her audience, juggling balls, and sticks. Although the painting is called Dancing Girl, she is not depicted dancing, but rather posing serenely, lips parted, gazing to the side. She is less an actor and more an aesthetic object, like the tapestry and painted tambourine.The Dancing Girl shares much in common with Vedder’s Girl with a Lute from 1866. Although there is little in the latter painting to suggest a Near Eastern setting, as there is in Dancing Girl, there are several other similarities between the two. In Girl with a Lute, a model dressed in an antique gown stands before a tapestry. She holds a large lute that rests on the floor next to her. Behind her, various decorative elements are arranged on a small table. She gazes pensively down. It was evidently a formula that brought the artist some success, as he sold Girl with a Lute to the art dealers Barry and Co. of Paris the same year he painted it. [1] In those years, Vedder did not always sell paintings with such ease, so his reasons for attempting a similar subject are clear.
Two influences in particular seem to have played a role in the choices that Vedder made for the 1871 Dancing Girl. The first was his interest in oriental subjects. In 1868, the artist had chosen a favorite book from his childhood, The Arabian Nights, as inspiration for his painting The Roc’s Egg. In his autobiography, Vedder himself mentions his fondness for the book of adventure stories. [2] In The Roc’s Egg, Vedder illustrates Sinbad the Sailor’s discovery of an enormous egg laid by a legendary bird called the Roc. Clearly, he found the Near East setting appealing and exotic.
Evidence of this interest, however, is by no means confined to The Roc’s Egg. Vedder’s fascination with the Orient runs as a theme throughout his career, from The Arabian Nights in the 1860s to The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in the 1880s. Several other mid-nineteenth-century Western artists also demonstrated this attraction to oriental settings and subjects. [3] Although artists since the Renaissance had created paintings set in the Near East, the proliferation of the theme in the nineteenth century is remarkable. During that period, Europe strengthened its diplomatic, commercial, and colonial ties to the Near East and North Africa. At the same time, the ease of traveling to those areas improved, and Western artists began visiting the region in greater numbers, paying close attention to its distinctive features. They found the landscape and the cultures both aesthetically rich and seductive. Harem scenes with dancing girls were a popular manifestation of the Orientalist strain, giving artists the opportunity to explore a subject that was sensual, erotic, and visually appealing.
The second factor influencing Vedder’s 1871 painting was likely his 1870 trip to London. There, he came into contact with some of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including John Everett Millais, who visited Vedder at least once in his studio. [4] Certainly, Vedder would have had the opportunity to see Pre-Raphaelite paintings, which often featured women lost in thought, posed alone before highly decorated backgrounds. Dancing Girl also shares with many of those paintings a debt to myth and legend.
Vedder includes one detail that makes this painting a vanitas piece, a painting that expresses ideas about the fragility of life and the inevitability of death. In the lower right corner rests the dancing girl’s wheel of fortune, and its arrow points toward a skull next to his dancing girl, reminding the viewer that such things as youth and beauty are fleeting.
In spite of this sobering detail, the overall effect of the painting is one of sumptuous beauty and exotic appeal. It was a formula that again brought Vedder some success; in her biography of the artist, Regina Soria quotes his wife’s Carrie’s description of the painting’s purchase: “V. painted one day the head, and the next morning in walked Mr. Edmund A. Ward of N.Y. and quietly bought it. …” [5] Indeed, the painting must have remained a family favorite, for it stayed in the Ward family for the next hundred years.
Notes:
[1] Regina Soria, Elihu Vedder: American Visionary Artist in Rome (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970), 50.
[2] Elihu Vedder, The Digressions of V (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910), 55.
[3] See, for example, paintings by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Léon Gérôme, William Holman Hunt, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and John Singer Sargent.
[4] Soria, Elihu Vedder, 71.
[5] Soria, Elihu Vedder, 304.
ProvenanceFrom 1871 to 1970
Edmund A. Ward, New York, purchased from the artist in 1871; his family, by descent. [1]
1970
Vose Galleries, Boston, MA, acquired from private dealer in Maine, July 30, 1970. [2]
1970
Graham Williford, Fairfield, Texas, purchased from Vose Galleries, Boston in September 1970. [3]
Kennedy Galleries, Inc., New York. [4]
To 1984
Barbara B. Millhouse, New York, NY and Winston-Salem, NC, purchased from Kennedy Galleries, Inc., New York. [5]
From 1984
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC, given by Barbara B. Millhouse on December 28, 1984. [6]
Notes:
[1] Kennedy Galleries, Inc. info sheets, object file.
[2] Memo to file, Ellen Kutcher, January 14, 1997.
[3] See note 2.
[4] Joan Durana Provenance Research, c. 1983 and old Reynolda House cover sheet, object file.
[5] See note 4.
[6] Deed of Gift, object file.
Exhibition History1971
American Masters, 18th to 20th Centuries
Kennedy Galleries, Inc., New York, NY (3/10/1971-4/3/1971)
Cat. No. 23
1975
Vedder 1836-1923
Hyde Collection, Glen Falls, NY (6/28/1975-8/31/1975)
1978-1979
Perceptions And Evocations: The Art Of Elihu Vedder
National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (10/13/1978-2/4/1979)
Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY (4/1979-7/8/1979)
Cat. No. 118
1990-1992
American Originals, Selections From Reynolda House Museum Of American Art
The American Federation of Arts
Center for the Fine Arts, Miami, FL (9/22/1990-11/18/1990)
Palm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs, CA (12/16/1990-2/10/1991)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (3/6/1991-5/11/1991)
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN (6/2/1991-7/28/1991)
Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Fort Worth, TX (8/17/1991-10/20/1991)
Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, IL (11/17/1991-1/12/1992)
The Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK (3/1/1992-4/26/1992)
2007
The Art of Dance
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC (4/3/2007-9/16/2007)
2012
Mystical Visions, Divine Revelations: Religion and Spirituality in 19th Century Art
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC (3/31/2012 – 11/25/2012)
Published ReferencesAmerican Masters, 18th to 20th Centuries. New York: Kennedy Galleries, Inc., 1971: 23, no.23.
Millhouse, Barbara B. and Robert Workman. American Originals. New York: Abbeville Press Pubs., 1990: 70-1.
Soria, Regina. Elihu Vedder: American Visionary Artist in Rome. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970: 304, no. 209.
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Reynolda: Her Muses, Her Stories , with contributions by Martha R. Severens and David Park Curry (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Reynolda House Museum of American Art affiliated with Wake Forest University, 2017). pg. 210, 211
Status
On view