Study for "The Lost Mind", Elihu Vedder

“The Idiot and the Bath-Towel.” This nickname was bestowed by the artist’s buddies on the painting for which this is the study. Vedder himself acknowledged that, “in fact the drapery was a little thick about the neck,” so much so that it presents an unbreachable barrier between the subject’s vacant face and her surroundings. There seems no plausible reason for her to be in such a desolate setting, wrapped in her heavy robe, yet neither does she seem out of place here. She is the personification of her own lost mind.
The painting is an early work from the most imaginative part of Vedder’s long and remarkable career. His contemporaries acclaimed him as “an idealist of idealists” who could be called “an artistic [Edgar Allan] Poe.” In The Lost Mind another writer discovered a “strange [Nathaniel] Hawthorne-like pathos . . . [in] the aimless hand, the vague glance, the irresolute gesture.” Such details reveal that, “from that beautiful face the informing sense is fled.” Vedder’s style, like his subjects, was extremely personal, free from convention, not perceptual but rather visionary or symbolic. At the time of Vedder’s death, after a long expatriation, he was remembered by a prominent critic as “one those artists with whom the American historian inevitably will have to reckon.” And so I do. CCE