The Art Institute of Chicago

The Rubáiyát of Omar KhayyámAuthor(s): Rachel Martin ColeSource: Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2, Art through the Pages:Library Collections at the Art Institute of Chicago (2008), pp. 40-41, 93Published by: The Art Institute of ChicagoStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20205618 .

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3 THE RUB?IY?T OF OMAR KHAYY?M

RACHEL MARTIN COLE

Edward FitzGerald's English translation of The Rubaiyat, z.

twelfth-century book of Persian poetry, sparked a sensation

among nineteenth-century publishers and readers. His work,

entitled The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, possesses a dream

like quality, rich imagery, and appealing beauty that are attested

to by the publication of hundreds of editions between 1859 and the present. From his first translation of the Rubaiyat to

his death in 1883, FitzGerald completed five versions of the text. The Persian original comprised a collection of over one

thousand quatrains, and FitzGerald felt free to transform

the work in his own way, rearranging the verses and taking

liberties with language. The result was a product that was less

a reflection of its medieval Persian origins than the tastes of its

nineteenth-century American audiences.

Figure i (left). Elihu Vedder (American, 1836-1923). Illustration for quatrain 29 of Edward FitzGerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Houghton Mifflin,

1886).

Figure 2 (below). Adelaide Hanscom Leeson (American, 1876-1932). Title page and facing portrait of Edward FitzGerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar

Khayyam (Dodge Publishing Company, 1905).

m? ^Sfe

40

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In 1884, Houghton Mifflin published the first, and

perhaps the best-known, illustrated version of the Rubdiydt. It contains forty-six black-and-white drawings by Elihu

Vedder that are among the first examples of the Art Nouveau

style seen in the United States (see fig. i).1 The illustrations were extremely well received; an article in the Atlantic

Monthly, for example, raved, "Mr. Vedder, as an artist

interpreter of Omar Khayyam, is the peer of Mr. Fitzgerald. He has revealed new depths of meaning in the words of the

great Persian poet-astronomer."2 In the years following the

publication of this volume, scores of illustrated versions were introduced, each attempting to interpret the text as

successfully as Vedder did, and each fueling the book's

continued popularity.

Twenty years later, Adelaide Hanscom Leeson continued

the tradition of Art Nouveau illustrations for the Rubdiydt, this time working with the relatively new medium of

photography. She produced twenty-eight images in all,

posing prominent literary figures from her home, the San

Francisco Bay area, to illustrate the verses. At the time,

photography had yet to become accepted as a true art

form, and women had yet to be recognized as practitioners. Her work, including her pictures for the Rubdiydt, was a

groundbreaking achievement for a female artist.

An advocate of Pictorialism, Hanscom sought to legit imize photography by incorporating the principles and

techniques of more established media. As a result, the

compositions and forms seen in her Rubdiydt illustrations are often taken from classical artwork. She also frequently

manipulated her negatives by etching and drawing on the

originals to produce painterly results. As this example

suggests, her images were as complex and mystical as the text that they were designed to accompany (see fig. 2).

ANIMAL LOCOMOTION: AN ELECTRO-PHOTOGRAPHIC INVESTIGATION OF CONSECUTIVE PHASES OF ANIMAL MOVEMENTS, 1872-1885

JEFFREY CARILLO

In 1872, Leland Stanford?eighth governor of California, founder of Stanford University, and an aficionado of horse

racing?reportedly made a bet with a friend regarding

"unsupported transit," the theory proposed by French

scientist Etienne-Jules Marey that during an animal's gait there are moments when all four limbs simultaneously leave the ground.1 Believing this theory to be true, Stanford

determined to prove it using photography and his record

breaking racehorse Occident.2 To do so, he called upon the British expatriate Eadweard Muybridge, a renowned

photographer based in San Francisco, to devise a precise method to test this proposition.

Over the next seven years, Muybridge worked to

develop and patent a camera with a mechanically operated shutter that was triggered when a moving object broke a

thread attached to the camera, thus capturing movement

instantaneously.3 The Horse in Motion, published in 1882

and credited to Stanford, documented these photographic

experiments. Having successfully refined a technique for photographing equine locomotion, Muybridge now

broadened his investigations to record the movement of

many other species, including birds and humans. With the

support of the Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins, as well as of Marey himself, in 1883 he was commissioned by the

University of Pennsylvania for a sum of $20,000 to create a

panoramic document of species movement.

The publication the resulted, Animal Locomotion: An

Electro-Photo graphic Investigation of Consecutive Phases

of Animal Movements, 1872-1885, consisted of 781 plates and was sold by subscription in several formats.4 At its most

luxurious, it sold for $600, and fewer than forty sets were

purchased. Nevertheless, sixteen morocco-bound volumes,

acquired by "Friends of the Art Institute" for $600, entered

the library in 1888, perhaps as the result of Muybridge's lectures in Chicago in that year.5 More popular were sets

of "100 unbound plates in a leather portfolio for $100," for

which the subscribers included politician Rutherford B.

Hayes, inventor Thomas Edison, and artist John La Farge.6

41

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Collection, Princeton University Library, 1982); Burr Wallen and Stephen Neil

Greengard, Pochoir: Flowering of the Hand-Color Process in Prints and Illustrated

Books, 1910-1935, exh. cat. (UCSB Art Museum, Santa Barbara, 1978); and Pat

Gilmour, "Stencilling," in Jane Turner, ed., The Dictionary of Art (Grove, 1996), vol. 29, pp. 626-29.

Ford and Tallarico, "Chicago Comics: A Century of Progress," pp. 30-34. 1. Jay Lynch, "The Adventures of Janey and Jay," Chicago Mirror 1, 2 (Winter

1968), p. 3. 2. The Ryerson's collection contains Zap Comix issues 1 through 11, and issue o.

Chipps, "Sarah E. Raymond Fitzwilliam and the Nuremberg Chronicle"

pp. 35-36. 1. For more on Raymond, see "Sarah Raymond: An Early School Administrator,"

Alliance Library System, www.alliancelibrarysystem.com/IllinoisWomen/files/

mc/htmi/raymond.htm (accessed Jan. 18, 2007); and "Obituary," Chicago Daily

Tribune, Feb. 1, I9i8,p. 15. 2. Hartmann Schedel, Chronicle of the World: The Complete and Annotated

Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493 (Taschen, 2001), p. 8.

3. Adrian Wilson, The Making of The Nuremberg Chronicle (Nico Israel, 1977),

p. 45.

4. Schedel (note 2), p. 8.

5. Ibid., p. 16.

6. Alfred Hamill spent a number of years as president of the Newberry Library board of trustees; served as a member of the board of trustees and vice president of the Art Institute; and was president of the Lake Forest Public Library, to name

just a few of his endeavors.

Van Deman, "Architectura Curiosa Nova" pp. 36-37. 1. For more on B?ckler and F?rst, see Andreas Kreul, "B?ckler, Georg Andreas,"

Grove Art Online, www.oxfordartonline.com (accessed Nov. 12,2007); "Boeckler,

Georg Andreas," in Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker, eds., Allgemeines Lexikon

der bildenden Kunstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, vol. 4 (W. Engelmann,

1910), p. 178; and "F?rst, Paul," in ibid., vol. 12 (1916), p. 563. 2. The only architectural work by B?ckler that has been specifically identified was a gate tower at Herried in Ansbach, built for the margrave in 1684-85 and

destroyed in 1750-51; see Andreas Kreul, "B?ckler, Georg Andreas,'" Grove Art

Online, www.oxfordartonline.com (accessed Nov. 12, 2007).

Cipkowski, "Inland Architect and News Record" pp. 38-39. 1. Inland Architect and News Record 1, 1 (Feb. 1883), p. 1.

2. Ibid.

3. Inland Architect and News Record 20, 5 (Dec. 1892), p. 47. The Ryerson and

Burnham Libraries hold extensive printed and archival collections on the World's

Columbian Exposition, including the personal and professional papers of its

director of works, Daniel H. Burnham (see pp. 67-70).

Martin Cole, "The Rub?iy?t of Omar Khayyam" pp. 40-41. 1. Regina Soria, "Vedder, Elihu," Grove Art Online, www.oxfordartonline.com

(accessed Jan. 17, 2008). 2. "Vedder's Drawings for Omar Khayyam's Rub?iy?t," Atlantic Monthly 55,

327 (Jan. 1885), p. 112. The Nineteenth Century in Print: Periodicals, Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpcoop/moahtml/snchome.html

(accessed Dec. 28, 2007).

Carillo, "Animal Locomotion" pp. 41-42. i. Robert Bartlett Haas, Muy bridge: Man in Motion (University of California

Press, 1976), p. 46. This essay is especially indebted to Haas's seminal biography. 2. James L. Sheldon and Jock Reynolds, Motion and Document, Sequence and

Time: Eadweard Muybridge and Contemporary American Photography, exh. cat.

(Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, 1991), p. 9.

3. Gordon Hendricks, Eadweard Muybridge: The Father of the Motion Picture

(Grossman Publishers, 1975), p. 101.

4. J. B. Lippincott and Company, later a prominent publisher of medical texts,

published the catalogues of plates, while the printer of the plates themselves, the

Photogravure Company of New York, was in control of plate distribution; Haas

(note 1), p. 154.

5. Ibid., p. 155; and Art Institute of Chicago library accession books, Ryerson and

Burnham Libraries, vol. 1, nos. ^66-y6. 6. Haas (note 1), pp. 155, 157.

7. The zoopraxiscope was based upon earlier inventions, the zoetrope and the

phenakistoscope. Edward J. Nygren and Frances Fralin, Eadweard Muybridge:

Extraordinary Motion, exh. cat. (Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1986), p. 8.

8. Haas (note 1), p. 174; and Kevin MacDonnell, Eadweard Muybridge: The Man

Who Invented the Moving Picture (Little, Brown, 1972), p. 32.

Oliveri, "TheKeimscott Chaucer" pp.43-44. 1. One Hundred Books (Bridwell Library, Southern Methodist University, 1986), no. 64, quoted in William S. Peterson, The Kelmscott Press: A History of William

Morris's Typographical Adventure (University of California Press, 1991), p. 229. 2. Peterson (note 1), p. 257.

3. Morris's suppliers were Henry Band and later William J. Turney and

Company. 4. The press run had to be increased from 325 to 425 paper copies in order to

make a profit. 5. The full leather copies were bound by the Doves Bindery, and one dummy full leather (made of extra and mistake pages from the press run) is also ascribed

to Leighton. Marion Tidcombe, The Doves Bindery (British Library/Oak Knoll

Books, 1991), p. 58.

Arvio and Nichols, "Ephemeral and Essential: The Pamphlet Files in the

Ryerson Library Collection," pp. 45-46. The introductory quote is taken from Martin Andrews, "The Stuff of Everyday Life: A Brief Introduction to the History and Definition of Printed Ephemera," Art Libraries Journal 31,4 (2006), p. 6. Other useful sources on ephemera include

Extra Art: A Survey of Artists' Ephemera, 1960-1999 (Smart Art Press, 2001); and

Maurice Rickards, This is Ephemera (Gossamer Press, 1977). 1. James Elkins, e-mail message to Thea Liberty Nichols, fall 2007.

Carillo,"Camera Work"pp.46-47. i. Although quarterly publication was not always sustained, fifty issues were

published from 1903 to 1917. 2. Camera Notes 6 (July 1902), as cited in Christian A. Peterson, Alfred Stieglitz's Camera Notes, exh. cat. (Minneapolis Institute of Arts/W. W. Norton, 1993), p. 52.

3. Alma Davenport, The History of Photography: An Overview (Focal Press,

1991), p. in. Shaw's letter appeared in issue fifteen, Steichen's photogravures in

issue nineteen.

4. Pam Roberts, "Foreword," in idem, Alfred Stieglitz, Camera Work: The Complete Illustrations 1903-1917 (Taschen, 1997), p. 14.

5. Ibid., 14. 6. Davenport (note 3), p. 115; William Innes Homer, Alfred Stieglitz and the

American Avant-Garde (New York Graphic Society, 1977), p. 75.

7. The Ryerson Library apparently did not subscribe to Camera Work as it was

issued. Thirty-five issues were purchased from Stieglitz in 1917 for $78, and others

were filled in later. Ryerson Library accession books, Ryerson and Burnham

Libraries, nos. 19008-017, May 1923 entries.

8. New periodicals featuring avant-garde art, such as The Seven Arts and The Soil,

emerged soon after the Armory Show.

9. Homer (note 6), p. 258. 10. Katherine Hoffman, Stieglitz: A Beginning Light (Yale University Press,

2004), p. 292. 11. Davenport (note 3), p. 116. Other sources state there were only thirty-six subscribers. 12. Roberts (note 4), p. 30.

93

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