Elihu Vedder
(1836 - 1923)
 

Elihu Vedder  was an American symbolist painter, book illustrator and poet from New York City. He is best known for his fifty-five illustrations for Edward FitzGerald's translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (deluxe edition, published by Houghton Mifflin).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elihu_Vedder

Memory
1870
Oil on mahogany panel
51.59 × 37.47
LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)
https://collections.lacma.org/node/225580

According to the artist’s annotation of the 1866 drawing The Face in the Clouds, he was inspired to create such a meditative image by Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem, "Break, Break, Break" (published 1842), in which the poet contemplates the sea and broods over the memory of lost ones.