Pyramids of Gizeh — Sunset Afterglow. Thomas Seddon (1821-1856). Oil on canvas. 21 x 31 inches (53.3 x 78.7 cm). c. 1856. Signed and inscribed "Eygpt" twice. Private collection. Image courtesy of the Fine Art Society. [The society has most generously given its permission to use information, images, and text from its catalogues in the Victorian Web. This generosity has led to the creation of hundreds and hundreds of the site's most valuable documents on painting, drawing, sculpture, furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, metalwork, and the people who created them. The copyright on text and images from their catalogues remains, of course, with the Fine Art Society. — GPL]
When William Holman Hunt and Seddon were camping near the Pyramids in February 1854 Seddon wrote down his initial impressions of the scene, which were not entirely favourable, but explains why he chose to paint the Pyramids in this manner at sunset:
I must say that both Pyramids and Sphinxes, in ordinary daylight, are merely ugly, and do not look half as large as the ought to look, knowing their real size; but in particular effects of light and shade, with a fine sunset behind them, for example, or when the sky lights up again, a quarter or half an hour afterwards – when long beams of rose-coloured light shoot up like a glory from behind the middle one into a sky of the most lovely violet – they then look imposing, with their huge black masses against the flood of brilliant light behind. There is a pool of water about a quarter of a mile off, where you can see them reflected; and there I think of attempting something. They are quite on the edge of the desert, being on a ledge of rock about a hundred feet high, and with five hundred yards of sand between them and the green fields…in fact, the Pyramid stand in the centre of an ancient burial ground. [52-53]
This obviously led to Seddon's decision to paint the Pyramids as a sunset view. In a letter to his fiancée Emmeline Bulford of March 15, 1854 he wrote:
The day after to-morrow I intend to return to the Pyramids, where I have begun a view of them by sunset, with a village on the left, and a sedgy pool of water, in which they are reflected. I shall try my best, but the difficulties are so great that I shall not be surprised if I fail; for, first, the weather is now so cloudy, and there are so few good sunsets, and then the effect is so transient, that it fades as you look at it, and half an hour after it is dark, and you are not able to paint till next day. If I succeed, I think it will please. [60]
On Good Friday, April 14, 1854, Seddon wrote in his diary: "Hunt came out yesterday to finish a sketch he had begun of the Sphinx. He rather encourages me about my picture of the Pyramids" (71).
This painting, in fact, became the chief work Seddon began in Egypt in 1854. It was only completed, however, in his studio after his return to London, with the valued assistance of Ford Madox Brown. In a letter of 5 March 1855 to his fiancée Seddon writes: "I have painted into my Pyramid picture a sky with spikes of light beaming up (only more faintly than in the small copy you saw), and some red clouds behind the Pyramids, all which is reflected in the water" (133-34). The painting was subsequently rejected at the Royal Academy in 1855 and Brown spent a considerable amount of time in reworking and completing the picture. Brown's diary for April 20, 1856 records: "Seddon has been here 3 days at his Pyramid picture which I found on going to see him as he asked me, was becoming so infernally bad that I took compassion on him & made up my mind to make him improve it as much as possible for I am tired of being cool to him seeing that he will not notice it so if I can make him improve his picture, I will" (qtd. in Surtees 170). Brown's diary for 21 April records: "directed Seddon nearly all morning" while for 23 April he states, "Painted all day at Seddons sky in his pyramids: a rash thing but I believe I did it some good if in drying it does not spoil itself. Altogether I have made him improve the general color of the picture" (qtd. in Surtees 171). Seddon's brother J. P. Seddon praised this picture as a "sublime poem" but did not mention Brown's contribution to the final result: "The Sunset View of the Pyramids was eminently successful. No one who has seen it will readily forget it. With its intensity of solitude, and with the daylight departing from those solemn memorials of human grandeur and frailty, it is a sublime poem, and the spell deepens as we gaze" (60-61).
When the picture was included amongst the Orientalist paintings shown at the semi-public exhibition held at Seddon's studio at 14 Berners Street in 1855, W. M. Rossetti in The Spectator felt this was the most important of Seddon's Egyptian pictures but regretted its lack of fluidity: "The Pyramids of Gizeh is the chief of the Egyptian pictures; the foreground, solemn in character, reflecting the opal-hued sky in the ooze of the receding Nile, and the sky itself, barred with sunset, a daring and interesting essay, although deficient in liquid quality" (392). Later when this painting was amongst the group of works shown in Seddon's rooms in Conduit Street in 1856 a critic of The Literary Gazette praised its colour and lighting effects:
Besides the views in the Holy Land, Mr. Seddon is also exhibiting, in his rooms in Conduit-street, a splendid view of the Pyramids at Sunset, with effects of light and colour that Orientalists assert to be true, but which were else almost incredible. The beams of rosy light that radiate off from the setting luminary seem actually to acquire density and solidity as they stream through the atmosphere; and the purple hue of one of the pyramids which is in the shade, seen behind and through a mist of brilliant sunlight, is most splendid. [476]
A critic for The Art Journal who reviewed this show obviously did not quite have all his information correct when he said that all the works had been painted on the spot:
"Mr. T. Seddon has arranged, for private exhibition, an interesting series of sketches, by himself, in Jerusalem and Egypt. They are pictures of remarkable places, most truthfully rendered, and an additional interest is given to them by the fact of their being all painted on the spot, and not at home from slight sketches, as is frequently the case. Hence, there is much truth and vigour about them. The large pictures of the Valley of Jehoshaphat, and the Pyramids, are excellently rendered; the undying interest of most of the scenes depicted, need, however, not be insisted on. They may be seen at 52, Conduit Street, throughout June. [194]
Soon after Thomas Seddon's death the picture was mentioned with special emphasis by The Athenaeum in its obituary of the artist:
The readers of the Athenaeum will probably remember that we especially drew their attention to Sunset behind the Pyramids, as a picture of singular beauty. Connected with this very beautiful work of Art is a little history, which, now that Death has placed his seal upon the hand which painted it, sheds a glory over the painter and the picture. In the Desert, Mr. Seddon had accidentally met a young Englishman who was near to death, and, in order to soothe his last weeks of suffering, took up his abode with the invalid in the true spirit of the "good Samaritan," and never left him until he had closed his eyes in peace. It was during this time of watching beside the otherwise desolate death-bed of a stranger in the Desert that this beautiful picture was commenced and almost entirely painted. It is lovely to recognize how, when the hour of his own need arrived for the painter, also in the Desert, a ministration of human love was raised up for him who had on a similar occasion so nobly acquitted himself of the last sacred duties towards a fellow sufferer. [19]
Link to Related Material
Bibliography
Eastern Encounters: Orientalist Paintings of the Nineteenth Century. London: The Fine Art Society, 1978. no. 59.
"Fine Arts." The Literary Gazette Issue 2060 (July 12, 1856): 476.
Minor Topics of the Month." The Art Journal New Series II (1 June 1856): 194-95.
Our Weekly Gossip." The Athenaeum No. 1523 (3 January 1857): 18-19.
Rossetti, William Michael, "Fine Arts. Oriental Pictures by Mr. Seddon." The Spectator XXVIII (14 April 1855): 392.
Seddon, John Pollard. Memoir and Letters of the Late Thomas Seddon, Artist. London: John Nisbet, 1858.
Staley, Allen. The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. 99.
Surtees, Virginia Ed. The Diary of Ford Madox Brown. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981.
Created 30 December 2004
Last modified (commentary added) 27 March 2024.