.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
In Perceptions and Evocations: The Art of Elihu Vedder, Jane Dillenberger discusses the evolution of the present work:
"In his autographical The Digressions of V, Vedder wrote: 'At the time I had my studio in the old Gibson Building on Broadway: I used to pass frequently a near corner, where an old negro woman sold peanuts. Her meekly bowed head and a look of patient endurance and resignation touched my heart and we became friends. She had been a slave down South, and had at that time a son, a fine tall fellow, she said, fighting in the Union Army. I finally persuaded her to sit for me and made a drawing of her head and also had her photograph taken.'...Years later, when he was formulating his painting of the sibyl, the brooding visage of Jane Jackson came to mind and thus Jane Jackson became the Cumaean Sibyl." (Washington, D.C., 1979, pp. 126-27)
"In his autographical The Digressions of V, Vedder wrote: 'At the time I had my studio in the old Gibson Building on Broadway: I used to pass frequently a near corner, where an old negro woman sold peanuts. Her meekly bowed head and a look of patient endurance and resignation touched my heart and we became friends. She had been a slave down South, and had at that time a son, a fine tall fellow, she said, fighting in the Union Army. I finally persuaded her to sit for me and made a drawing of her head and also had her photograph taken.'...Years later, when he was formulating his painting of the sibyl, the brooding visage of Jane Jackson came to mind and thus Jane Jackson became the Cumaean Sibyl." (Washington, D.C., 1979, pp. 126-27)