ELIHU VEDDER
(New York 1836 – 1923 Rome)

The Eclipse of the Sun by the Moon


Signed, lower right: Vedder 1892


Pastel on paper, laid on board
18 x 25 inches (45.7 x 63.5 cm)

Provenance:

Mrs. Thomas Gurney, Fallbrook CA, 1972
Tom and Christine Accatino, Palm Springs, CA
Private Collection, New York, 2019–2025.

The genesis of Elihu Vedder’s Eclipse of the Sun by the Moon was as a proposal for part of the mural decoration of the dome of the Agriculture Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1892. Vedder travelled to Chicago, but soon the project filled the artist with trepidation due to the scale of the murals (12 feet in diameter), the working conditions on the scaffold, and the deadline to completion of only four months. It may thus have been a relief to the artist when Vedder’s design was initially rejected by Frank Millet, who oversaw the project.[i]  Vedder soon chose not to participate further, to the dismay of Millet and the building’s architect Charles McKim—a decision prompted in part by Vedder’s having received two important large-scale commissions, for the ceiling of Collis and Arabella Huntington’s mansion in New York (now at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven) and for a large lunette to be installed in the Bowdoin College Art Gallery (in situ). Both of these could be painted with assistants in the artist’s studio in Rome and later installed on site. 

The present work is a highly finished pastel which, by its signature and date is likely to have been the rejected presentation drawing for the World’s Columbian Exposition. A smaller undated charcoal drawing formerly in the Corcoran Gallery and now at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. may have been a preliminary study or a ricordo of the composition (Fig. 1).[ii]

 
Charcoal drawing on green paper of a partially nude female woman sitting near the moon and pointing at a passage in a book.

Fig. 1. Elihu Vedder, The Eclipse of the Sun by the Moon, charcoal and chalk on blue paper, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

 

Not one to abandon a successful design, Vedder later painted two oil paintings on the same theme, close in size to our pastel. One, noted by Vedder’s wife as a “study for a picture to be painted larger” was sold in 1899 to E. B. Haskell of Auburndale, New York, one of the artist’s regular collectors.[iii] The other, signed and inscribed “Copyright 1899” was in the collection of Mrs. Donald S. Tuttle of Naugatuck, CT, and later with Kennedy Galleries in New York (Fig. 2).[iv] Ten years later Vedder repeated the composition in a larger oil painting of rectangular format now in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History, New York (Fig. 3).[v]

Black and white photograph of another version of a painting of a partially nude female woman sitting near the moon and pointing at a passage in a book.

Fig. 2. Elihu Vedder The Eclipse of the Sun by the Moon, oil on canvas, formerly Kennedy Galleries, New York.

A colorful and sunset-lit version of another painting of a partially nude female woman sitting near the moon and pointing at a passage in a book.

Fig. 3. Elihu Vedder, The Eclipse of the Sun by the Moon, oil on canvas, American Museum of Natural History, New York.

Solar eclipses have had profound significance to humanity since antiquity, and the desire to record them visually has challenged artists over the centuries.[vi]  Vedder approached the subject allegorically with the combination of mysticism and symbolism that characterized so much of his art. In his 1922 illustrated book of poetry, Doubt and Other Things, Vedder accompanied an illustration of his Eclipse painting (Fig. 2), with a poem reflecting both his visionary conception of natural and astronomical phenomena and his overriding preoccupation with fate.[vii]

The Eclipse
 

Lovers, they say, still vow and sigh
Neath thy bright rays,
O huntress of the sky!
Though Science ignores Mythology
Yet fancy sees Thee patiently
Counting thy month-long nights and days,
Keeping thine orbit’s strict integrity.
What hopest Thou? Some cosmic crash
That shattering our old world to bits,
may end thy task’s monotony
And from Earth’s bondage set Thee free?

[i] Regina Soria, Elihu Vedder: American Visionary Artist in Rome (1836–1923), Rutherford-Madison-Teaneck, 1970, p. 211.

[ii] Charcoal and chalk on green wove paper, 12 ½ x 19 inches (317.5 x 482.6 cm). Acc. 2014.136.197. Signed, lower right, Vedder, and inscribed verso “Eclipse of the Sun by the Moon.” See: Perceptions and Evocations: The Art of Elihu Vedder, exh. cat., intro by Regina Soria, Washington, 1979, pp. 159-160, fig. 197.

[iii] Soria, Elihu Vedder, p. 347, no. 534.

[iv] Oil on canvas, 20 ¼ x 26 ½ inches. Perceptions and Evocations, pp. 159-160, fig. 196. The painting is undated but placed circa 1893–1899 in the Perceptions catalogue. Soria, Elihu Vedder, p. 347, no. 535.

[v] Oil on canvas, 32 x 44 ½ inches. American Museum of Natural History, Asset no. art-100221666-1. See: https://digitalcollections.amnh.org/archive/Eclipse-of-the-Sun-by-the-Moon-2URM1TH3EG45Y.html. Accessed 27 April 2025. The painting is signed and inscribed: 1902 Copyright by E. Vedder and, lower right, Elihu Vedder Rome. A label on the frame reads: “For Frank H. Forrester/Hayden Planetarium/81 St Central Park West/N.Y.” Forrester was a long-time meteorologist and astronomer at the Hayden Planetarium of the Museum.

[vi] Roberta J. M. Olson and Jay M. Pasachoff, Cosmos: The Art and Science of the Universe, London, 2019, pp. 49-86.

[vii] Elihu Vedder, Doubt and Other Things, Boston, 1922, pp. 70-71.