The Great Sphinx at the Pyramids of Gizeh. Watercolour and gouache. 9 3/4 x 13 7/8 inches (24.7 x 35.3 cm). Collection of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, accession no. WA1944.30. Image kindly provided by the author.
Seddon painted this watercolour sometime between February and May 1853 during his first trip to the Middle East when he was camping in the Egyptian desert outside Cairo. Seddon had arrived in Cairo on December 8, 1853, prior to the arrival of William Holman Hunt. Seddon was soon joined briefly by Edward Lear, who was about to set off on a trip up the Nile. Although Seddon delayed commencing any major work until Hunt's arrival, he did sketch several subjects and Lear gave him initial advice on the pictures. Hunt did not arrive until late January 1854. Board and lodging at the hotel cost seven shillings a day so once Hunt arrived they moved and lived initially in a tent within a hundred yards of the Pyramids and close to the Sphinx. Eventually this proved not to Hunt's liking and he returned to Cairo but Seddon remained there for nearly two months. Following the death of a new acquaintance, a young Englishman named Nicholson, Seddon moved into an empty tomb near the Sphinx that Nicholson had formerly occupied since it was larger, cooler, and more comfortable than the tent.
In a letter of March 27, 1854 to his fiancée Seddon described the activities depicted in his watercolour:
"It is very amusing just now to watch the operations which Mr. Marriette is carrying on for the French Government round the Sphinx, where he is searching for an entrance. There are about one hundred children removing the sand. Some eight or ten men and bigger boys fill small round baskets with sand, and there are two gangs, one of boys and the other girls. Some elder ones lift the baskets onto the heads of the children, who carry them up the slope in two long processions, the head boy and girl singing, and the others all joining in chorus, and laughing and joking and shouting, while two or three majestic old Arabs, standing by as overseas, with store of vociferation and blows, not serious, which, coming on their loose drapery, only just keeps them at work, and rather increases the laughter than otherwise" (64-65).
Auguste Mariette was a famous French Egyptologist and archeologist and founder of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities. In his excavations at the Sphinx he was attempting to uncover a temple at the Sphinx's feet.
An inscription on the back of the work "Sky repainted" suggests that Seddon must have reworked this watercolour after he returned to London in 1855, likely with the assistance of Ford Madox Brown. It is one of a group of at least nine watercolours that Seddon showed in his semi-public exhibition held at his studio, No. 14 Berners Street in London, between March 17-June 3, 1855. He later exhibited it in autumn of that same year at the Liverpool Academy, no. 436. It remained unsold at these venues and was eventually purchased by his fellow artist and friend George Price Boyce in February 1856. In June 1856 Seddon showed the work one final time in his rooms in Conduit Street. When this watercolour was exhibited there a critic of The Literary Gazette compared it to Hunt's watercolour of the Sphinx then on display at the Royal Academy: "This [The Pyramids at Gizeh], and an admirable sketch of the Sphinx, which may be compared with that by Holman Hunt, in the Academy Exhibition, having been taken at the same time, are equally valuable records of Egypt" (476). Hunt's watercolour of the Sphinx, entitled The Sphinx, Giza, Looking towards the Pyramids of Saqqara, done at the same time as Seddon's, shows the structure in a rear view. Allen Staley has compared the two works: "His [Seddon's] watercolour is more anecdotal and more conventional than Hunt's. His watercolour is also more linear and less strongly coloured than Hunt's, but the two works are approximately the same size, and their compositions balance in a way that suggests that they may have been conceived as pendants" (The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, 99). Seddon's watercolour is painted in the bright sunshine while Hunt's shows the Sphinx in the late afternoon light. In Hunt's watercolour three of the pyramids of Saqqara, which are located twenty-three kilometers to the south, can be seen on the horizon. Robin Hamlyn felt that: "Compared with Hunt's unconventional rendering of the Sphinx, Seddon's watercolour…betrays the essentially topographical and limited nature of Seddon's landscape art" (270).
G. P. Boyce, who initially owned Seddon's watercolour, later painted his own version of the Sphinx in January 1862 entitled The Sphinx near Giza in morning light. This work sold in the Peter Rose and Albert Gallachin collection at Christie's in 2021.
Link to Related Material
Bibliography
An Aesthetic Odyssey. The Peter Rose and Albert Gallichan Collection. London: Christie's (30 September 2021): lot 194, 189.
"Fine Arts." The Literary Gazette Issue 2060 (12 July 1856): 476.
Hamlyn, Robin. The Pre-Raphaelites. London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1984, cat. 203.
Hunt, William Holman. Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Vol. I. London: MacMillan & Co. Ltd., 1905.
Newall, Christopher. Pre-Raphaelites: Beauty and Rebellion. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016.
Payne, Christina. Pre-Raphaelites: Drawings and Watercolours. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2021, 212.
Seddon, John Pollard. Memoir and Letters of the Late Thomas Seddon, Artist. London: John Nisbet and Co., 1858.
Staley, Allen. In Allen Staley and Christopher Newall Eds. Pre-Raphaelite Vision Truth to Nature. London: Tate Publishing, 2004, cat. 59, 109.
Staley, Allen. The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape. Oxford: Clarendon press, 1973, 99.
Created 28 March 2024