Engraved portrait as frontispiece to Memoir and Letters of the Late Thomas Seddon, 1858.
Thomas Seddon was born on August 28, 1821 in Aldersgate Street, London, the son of a well-known furniture maker of the same name and his wife Frances Nelson Seddon. He received his early education at Stanmore, from the age of six until about around the age of sixteen. in the school established by the Reverend Joseph Barron. Thomas early on developed a love of drawing. After leaving school he worked in the family business, but found this work uncongenial. His leisure hours were once again devoted to drawing. In 1841 he was sent to Paris to study ornamental art. By the time he returned in 1842 Seddon had already decided to become a painter, but he continued his study of design. He attended lectures on architecture given by Thomas Leverton Donaldson and studied works in the British Museum. He joined the Decorative Art and the Archeological Societies. In 1848 his design for an ornamental sideboard won a silver medal offered by the Society of Arts. He took lessons at Charles Lucy's drawing school in Camden Town and also attended life classes held by the Artist's Society at Clipstone Street in order to improve his draughtsmanship. In the summer of 1849 he travelled to North Wales with his brother John where Thomas began his first serious attempts at landscape painting in watercolours. In 1850 he went to Barbizon in the forest of Fontainbleau where he made three oil studies. Seddon had already come into contact with the Pre-Raphaelite circle by 1848 when he made the acquaintance of Ford Madox Brown. Around 1850 Seddon was actively involved with the establishment in Camden Town of the North London School of Drawing and Modelling, which was an art school intended for working men.
In 1851 he finally quit has career as a furniture designer to devote himself to painting and he moved to rooms in Percy Street off Tottenham Court Road. It was here he worked on his figure painting Penelope, which became the first work that he exhibited at the Royal Academy. In late 1851 he again travelled to Wales. In the summer of 1852 he travelled to Dinan in Brittany to visit his sisters who were staying there. It was here he met and fell in love with a young woman named Emmeline Bulford. Seddon spent much of early 1853 preparing for a journey to Egypt in the company of William Holman Hunt. Seddon travelled first to France, not leaving for Egypt until November. He arrived in Alexandria on December 6 and then moved on to Cairo. Seddon and Hunt initially set up camp near the Pyramids where they spent a few months. In late May 1854 they decided to travel to Palestine. In Jerusalem Seddon pitched his tent looking up the Valley of Jehoshaphat from where he painted his masterpiece Jerusalem and the Valley of Jehoshaphat from the Hill of Evil Counsel. Seddon returned to London in January 1855. He showed the major works he had completed at an exhibition held in March at his studio at 14 Berners Street. He exhibited further Orientalist subjects in 1856 in Conduit Street. On June 30, 1855 he married Emmeline Bulford at the British Ambassador's Chapel at Paris, having become engaged to her in Dinan in France in 1853. After staying a short time in France the couple moved back to London where they resided in Kentish Town.
In October 1856 Seddon travelled to Cairo again but died there from an attack of dysentery on November 23, 1856. He was buried in the English burial ground in Cairo. In 1857 an exhibition of his works was held in the gallery of the Society of Arts. His Jerusalem and the Valley of Jehoshaphat from the Hill of Evil Counsel was purchased by subscription and donated to the National Gallery. It is now in Tate Britain.
Like Holman Hunt, Seddon believed that his visit to the Middle East had provided him with invaluable access to visible truths unavailable to those without first-hand knowledge of the landscape. Experiencing the landscapes that had provided the setting for the events of sacred history itself made that history appear more authentic and more believable. As he wrote from Jerusalem on 10 June 1854, "Besides the beauty of this land, one cannot help feeling that one is treading upon holy ground; and it is impossible to tread the same soil which our Lord trod, and wander over His favourite walks with the apostles, and follow the very road He went from Gethsemane to the Cross, without seriously feeling that it is a solemn reality, and no dream" (85). Like his companion, Seddon accepted that his first-hand encounter with the landscape of Jerusalem and other sacred sites offered both a high artistic opportunity and an equally high artistic duty. Before he arrived in Jerusalem, Seddon wrote to his future wife saying he believed that he must "wield my brush in defence of the holy city from all misrepresentation" (70).
Hunt had a major influence upon Seddon while they were in the Middle East, and this influence clearly appears in the letters Seddon wrote home, which are remarkable because they so resemble those written by Hunt himself. Like his traveling companion, Seddon found Egypt a disappointment but was delighted by Jerusalem, and like Hunt, his encounters with the landscapes within which Bible events had taken place produced spiritual experiences so intense that they amounted to religious conversions. Like Hunt, Seddon devoted significant portions of his letters to describing and meditating upon these landscapes, and, like his companion, his painting relates importantly to those emotional experiences of landscape. Finally, while painting his major work produced during this stay in the Middle East, he shared Hunt's idea that typological symbolism could enrich the pictorial image. Hunt, we know, also continued to assist Seddon after his return home by completing one of his watercolours, and he also helped in the sale of Jerusalem and the Valley of Jehoshaphat to benefit the artist's family after his death.
An estimate of Seddon's work as a landscape painter was given by John Ruskin in The Athenaeum following the artist's death:
Mr. Seddon's works are the first which represent a truly historic landscape Art; that is to say, they are the first landscapes uniting perfect artistical skill with topographical accuracy, - being directed with stern self-restraint, to no other purpose than that of giving to persons who cannot travel trustworthy knowledge of the scenes which ought to be most interesting to them. Whatever degrees of truth may have been attained or attempted by previous artists have been more or less subordinate to pictorial or dramatic effect. In Mr. Seddon's works, the principal object is to place the spectator, as far as Art can do, in the scene represented, and to give him the perfect sensation of its reality, wholly unmodified by the artist's invention. The accomplishment of such a purpose in the Holy Land involves both labour and danger such as the profession of an artist has never until now incurred. [379]
Bibliography
Chisholm, Hugh Ed. "Seddon, Thomas." Encyclopædia Britannica Vol. 24 (11th ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911. 577.
Eastern Encounters: Orientalist Paintings of the Nineteenth Century. London: The Fine Art Society, 1978.
Hunt, William Holman. Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 2 vols. London: 1905.
Landow, George P. "Thomas Seddon's "Moriah." The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic Studies. I (1987): 59-65. [ text]
Landow, George P. "William Holman Hunt's Letters to Thomas Seddon." Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, LXVI (1983): 139-72.
Ruskin, John. "Fine Art Gossip." The Athenaeum No. 1534 (March 21, 1857): 379.
Seddon, John Pollard. Memoir and Letters of the Late Thomas Seddon, Artist. London: John Nisbet and Co., 1858.
Staley, Allen and Christopher Newall. Pre-Raphaelite Vision: Truth to Nature. London: The Tate Gallery, 2004.
Staley, Allen. The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.
"Thomas Seddon." The Crayon VI, No. III (March 1859): 73-77.
Created 26 March 2024