Thomas Seddon (1821 - 1856)
Thomas Seddon was closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and the few pictures he painted of the Near East before his untimely death belong more in feeling and technique to this group than to the mainstream Orientalists. The son of a wellknown furniture maker, he visited Paris, Barbizon and the Brittany sea town of Dinan, before first exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1852. He left for Cairo at the end of 1853, where he met Edward Lear, whose "advice as an experienced traveller," he said, "has been very useful." He also came across Richard Burton, a linguist and Arab scholar who, brilliant and intolerant of convention and restraint, was one of the most fascinating people of his time. Seddon painted Burton in full Arab costume; this portrait was used in lithographic form to illustrate the English explorer's account of his daring and risky journey to Mecca, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrim to Al-Madinah & Meccah, published in 1855. After the watercolour version was exhibited in London by The Fine Art Society in 1978, the same portrait in oil, left by Seddon in Egypt, turned up in a private collection.
In the spring of 1854, Seddon left Cairo for Palestine in the company of Holman Hunt. This was partly to study the Pre-Raphaelite's technical mastery, and partly to avoid going back to work in his father's business. While he lacked Hunt's high-minded reasons for visiting the Holy
Land, Seddon, by painting biblical landscapes, was atoning for (according to his brother) "a taste for pleasure and dissipation which he had formed in Paris." It was on this journey that Hunt painted his famous symbolic picture, The Scapegoat (now in the Lever Art Gallery in PortSunlight), at which he worked away in the blazing sun while repulsing attacks from hostile Arab tribesmen.
Seddon arrived back in Dinan in November 1854 and set about organising a private exhibition of his works in London for the following year. These were highly praised by the theorist John Ruskin, who raised a fund after Seddon's death to offer his key painting, Jerusalem and the Valley of Jehoshaphat from the Hill of Evil Counsel to the nation (p. 109). A watercolour repetition of this composition, in the Ashmolean museum, Oxford, was painted directly over a photograph, either of the landscape itself or of the oil painting. In 1856, Seddon showed pictures at the Royal Academy, including An Arab Sheikh and Tents in the Egyptian desert and Interior of a Deewan, formerly belonging to the Copt Patriarch near the Esbekeeyah, Cairo. He returned to Cairo in the same year but, already in fragile health from rheumatic fever, he fell ill and died. An exhibition of his works was held at the Society of Arts in London in 1857, on which occasion Ruskin gave a speech saying that although Seddon might have outgrown his "careful, faithful, conscientious and poetical" technique, he was, owing to his early death, "the purest Pre-Raphaelite landscape painter."
Literature: J.P. Seddon, Memoirs and letters of the late Thomas Seddon, artist, London, 1858; A. Staley, The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, Oxford, 1973.