Dromedary and Arabs at the City of the Dead, Cairo, with the Tomb of Sultan El Barkook in the Background. Thomas Seddon (1821-1856). Oil on canvas, 12 x 16 1/2 inches (30.5 X 41 cm). Signed and dated 1856. 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]
The Mameluke City of the Dead is now in an area of Cairo that is densely populated unlike the barren landscape portrayed here. The tomb in the background is for the Sultan El Barkook [Barkuk], the first Mameluke Sultan. It was constructed between 1399 and 1410. Seddon began a sketch of this subject soon after he arrived in Cairo in December 1853, but only completed it in his studio once he returned to London. It was Ford Madox Brown who had suggested to Seddon before his leaving for Egypt that he should make sketches and then paint his pictures in the studio once back in England. In a letter from Cairo to Brown, Seddon writes: "Since Hunt came here I have not quite followed your advice, and have done no sketches here; but at Jerusalem I intend to do so, and leave any parts which can be done in England" (qtd. in Hueffer 99). This suggests Seddon must have made his initial sketch for this picture before Hunt arrived in late January 1854.
While in Cairo, Seddon resided initially in the Williams' Indian Family Hotel where he met Edward Lear who was also staying there. Seddon, in a letter of December 30, 1853 to his fiancée Emmeline Bulford, wrote:
I have been very glad of Lear's arrival, both because his advice as an experienced traveller has been very useful, and also because I have been able to consult him about the pictures I think of painting… I have already painted a camel and Bedouin on a small canvas, 14 inches by 10 inches, which is finished, except the desert for a background (32). Because this letter makes no mention of the tomb, Alison Smith feels its addition was probably at the suggestion of Lear (118). Smith finds the work reminiscent of the work of the famed British Orientalist painter John Frederick Lewis. The first version of this subject was purchased by Lord Grosvenor, where ironically it was hung with two pictures by Lewis, which Seddon commented was "honourable company. I wish I had painted still more carefully" (141).
The composition therefore exists in two versions and this is the second later version. In a letter to Madox Brown on April 2, 1855 Seddon wrote: "I have sold my water-colour Shekh [Richard Burton], and have a commission to paint at my leisure a repetition of my Dromedary, altering the figure of the Arab, and rather increasing the canvas" (141). In the second version Seddon incorporated two Bedouin figures in the left foreground rather than the one.
The first version of this work was among those shown at Seddon's studio at No. 14 Berners Street in 1855 at the semi-public exhibition of his Orientalist pictures. W. M. Rossetti in The Spectator also compared this particular picture to works by J. F. Lewis: "The last three are figure-subjects, - an Arab and Dromedary at the city of the dead, Cairo; an Arab Sheikh; and a Sheikh with camel lying down. Here the same earnest fidelity which distinguishes the landscapes is applied to human and brute life; and here too we are reminded of the excellences of Lewis, simply because we recognize the higher excellence of truth" (392).
Seddon exhibited a version of the painting at the Royal Academy in 1856, no. 474. A critic for The Art Journal considered it one of the best of the Orientalist pictures recently exhibited: "No. 474. Dromedary and Arabs at the City of the Dead, Cairo, with the Tomb of the Sultan El Barkook, in the background, T. B. Seddon. With respect to effect, this is one of the best of these desert pictures which are now becoming so numerous" (171). The painter Frank Dillon had also shown two Egyptian scenes at this same exhibition.
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Bibliography
Bronkhurst, Judith. Pre-Raphaelites. Stockholm: National Museum, 2009, cat. 110, 201.
Eastern Encounters: Orientalist Paintings of the Nineteenth Century. London: The Fine Art Society, 1978. no. 58.
Hueffer, Ford Madox. Ford Madox Brown. A Record of His Life and Works. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1896.
Rossetti, William Michael, "Fine Arts. Oriental Pictures by Mr. Seddon." The Spectator XXVIII (14 April 1855): 392.
"The Royal Academy." The Art Journal New Series II (1 June 1856): 161-74.
Smith, Alison. In Allen Staley and Christopher Newall Eds. Pre-Raphaelite Vision Truth to Nature. London: Tate Publishing, 2004, cat. 66. 118.
Staley, Allen. The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1973. 99.
Created 9 June 2007
Last modified (commentary added) 27 March 2024.