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"I am not a mystic, or very learned in occult matters. I have read much in a desultory manner and have thought much, and so it comes that I take short flights or wade out into the sea of mystery which surrounds us, but soon getting beyond my depth, return, I must confess with a sense of relief, to the solid ground of common sense; and yet it delights me to tamper and potter in the unknowable . ... There is another thing- the ease with which I can conjure up visions." - Elihu Vedder
A native New Yorker, Vedder spent most of his life abroad, especially in Italy, where he associated with the MACCHIAIOLI, though he also studied in Paris for eight months. He was greatly influenced by works of the ITALIAN RENAISSANCE on the one hand, and by exotic stories from the Orient on the other. The Questioner of the Sphinx (1863) is an image inspired by the myth of the Great Sphinx of Giza: A proportionally small man crouches in front of the enormous head of the Sphinx, his ear against its lips; a skull rests in the sand nearby. Vedder may have been inspired by HEGEL, who wrote of the Sphinx as " . . . the symbol of the symbolic itself ... recumbent animal bodies out of which the human body is struggling .... The human spirit is trying to force its way forward out of the dumb strength and power of the animal, without coming to a perfect portrayal of its own freedom and animated shape." In Greek mythology, Oedipus avoided death and defeated the Sphinx by answering the riddle it posed. This part of the story was illustrated by INGRES in Oedipus Explains the Riddle of the Sphinx ( 1808 ). Vedder's visions, which he wrote about in his autobiography, quoted from above (The Digressions of V. Written for His Own Fun and That of His Friends, 1910 ), were also of strange sea serpents and deranged wanderers.
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