Titian's Model

Elihu Vedder, a native New Yorker, lived in Italy for most of his career as part of a large group of American expatriate artists in late 19th-century Rome. Like many American and English artists working in Italy, Vedder admired Renaissance art, and several paintings dating around the time he settled in Rome reflect this. The immediate access to this artistic heritage was what lured artists and tourists there in droves. Note the rich coloration, which reflects 16th-century Venetian painting, particularly the works of Titian.

The contents of Vedder's Roman studio remained in his daughter Anita's hands until the 1950s. She bequeathed a large number of these to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which distributed them to museums across the United States, including the Hudson River Museum.