A Castle near Perugia is perhaps the most beautiful of all the small studies done by Vedder during his first sojourn in Italy. Almost monochromatic in tone, the high horizon line, the castle set off to the right, mark a departure from the classic perceptive taught from the Renaissance on. The work foretells the work of the great American artist Edward Hopper and his Lighthouse series that are still 60 years away. As with Hill Town near Volterra these two works are unique in Vedder's oeuvre. The blond palette is similar in ways to Odorado Borrani and Nino Costa. Yet the artist does make it his own. The Tuscan light invades the small picture. The solitude and emptiness give an enduring quality not unlike the earlier artists of the cinquecento Vedder had studied in Florence. Done on one Vedder's numerous "sketching trips" into the countryside in Italy it is another of the works the artist kept with him until his death. These small ricordi and bozzetti held a special place for him. Given the diverse paths his art would take, the small landscape studies and the highly finished panel pictures in the then current taste for of women in diaphanous gowns, one had to wonder which mattered to him most. The enigma of Vedder is that they both seemed to have mattered. The slavish detail of Minerva and the freedom of this work and others. His art remains an enduring legacy to this perhaps most unique of all American artists who worked in the 19th. century.