Sales catalogue: Quaritch

Date:: 1st January 1885

Reference:: WA/HMM/CM/Sal/17/37

Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sales catalogue: Quaritch. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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of the eleventh century, but a sage, Mise philosophy is for ali time.. for Persian tile-patterns, arched recesses copied from Flandin and Coste, and the details of the archeological costumier, are foredoomed to disappointment. ~Vedder’s Omar has no fixed place in history, and belongs to no century. He moves among people and places Eastern - and remote ; but the people are not distinctively Persian, and the places may not be identfied upon the map of Iran. The loose robes, the easy slippers, the simple caps of the philosopher and his friend are of a fashion as ancient as the youth of the Aryan race, and as modern as that of to-day. Their wine-cups and amphorx are moulded after patterns which were already of immemorial antiquity in the times of the Pharaohs. Such architectural accessories as here and there occur are of a massive primeval character, and bear no stamp of style. The very plains dnd uplands of Mr. Vedder’s landscape backgrounds, the forest spring at which the gazelle drinks, the wooded solitude where the poet lies reading in a morn of spring, the desert sands and distant lonely hills, wear a strange and unaccustomed aspect, as if they belonged to the first ages of the world. Having rejected the fetters of local colour Mr, Vedder has also forborne to ally himself with, either school of interpreters. His creed varies with his subject, and he is by turns mystic or sceptic, Sufi or Muslim. Love, he renders simply and humanly. God-like youths, and such fair maidens as strayed of old through Tempe and the Vales of Arcady, gather the rose and the grape, and kiss in the shade of the vine. The tavern, the wine-cup, and the bliss of the reveller are also, of necessity, treated in the Anacreontic sense, To give artistic impossible. Though comparatively few in number, these idyllic and Bacchanalian scenes supply. just that element of warmth and beauty which is needed to relieve the sterner stuff of Mr, ‘Vedder’s other illustrations, That his noblest work comes out in that sterner stuff need scarcely be said. Himself always more or less a mystic, he has found in the Ruba iydt a mine of subjects after his own heart. Fortunately 7Omar’s day to his. Had the Rubd’iydt been translated into Latin or German four centuries ago, or into English within the memory of many still living, Albert Direr and Blake would assuredly been beforehand with Elihu Vedder. But neither Albert Durer nor Blake, nor apy other master dead and gone..could, I venture to think, have succeeded in sublimity and subtlety of conception at least a score of these extraordinary designs. Of the 1200 quatrains attributed to Omar Khayy4m, no man knows with certainty which are authentic, or in what order they should be presented. As selected and manipulated by Mr. Fitzgerald, t he 101 quatrains of Quaritch’s edition assume an appearance of unity of long since pointed out) is not only arbitrary partaking of the nature of an ‘“‘eclogue ” the nature of an epic. Each editor or trans- lator is, however; obviously free to arrange this heterogeneous material according to his own judgment ; and Mr. Vedder, having due regard to the rendering of his “accompaniment, ”” has wisely used the same librety. Thus he begins with sunrise, the promise of the budding spring-time, and ‘the glories of this world ;” next follow subjects dealing creeds, systems, and sciences ; and these again siderations of the futility of efforts, the hollow- ness and hopelessness of achievement, and the mystery of death. Finally, as he began with spring, so he ends with autumn, andthe failing year. The potter’s workshop supplies store of amphore for the new vintage. The philo- sopher, beguiled by pleasure, lays aside his pen, and ‘“‘ drowns his glory in a shallow cup ;’’ men and maidens quaff last year’s juice under vine- boughs which are once again laden with grapes; and when the poet himself passes away, the handmaiden, who so often filled his cup in the pleasant garden where the revellers meet, turns down an empty glass upon the spot where he was wont to recline. copy of Mr. Fitzgerald’s earlier edition at hand, I am unable to detect to what extent the artist has departed from the order adopted by his translator ; but as regards the sequence of the designs, nothing can be better than his harmo- nious crescendo and decrescendo of passion. To convey in words, to those who have not seen Mr. Vedder’s illustrations, any definite idea of the tragie pitch to which that crescendo rises, is simply impossible. Like another world and through the realms of space; but unlike Dante he gently brings us home again at last. - Want of space forbids me to do more than very briefly indicate a few of these fifty-six descriptive analysis might easily be written. illustrations is called “The Long Rest.” A beautiful woman languidly descends a narrow Outside this door, which stands ajar, lie the who have gone before. she has just set down, is spent and flickering, Leaving the world naked as she came into it, she casts off the vesture of humanity ; that vesture a veil-like drapery woven of elemental stuff, vaporous, smokelike, interpenetrated with floating shreds of leaves and blossoms. As upward, its component parts returnin