Thomas Seddon

For the New Zealand politician see Tom Seddon

Thomas Seddon (28 August 1821 in London – 23 November 1856 in Cairo) was an English landscape painter associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who painted colourful and highly detailed scenes of Brittany, Egypt, and Jerusalem.

Life

Jerusalem and the Valley of Jehoshaphat from the Hill of Evil Counsel, 1854. (Tate Gallery)

Seddon was born on 28 August 1821 in Aldersgate Street in the City of London, the son of a well-known cabinet-maker of the same name. He was educated at a school conducted on the Pestalozzian system by the Rev. Joseph Barron at Stanmore, and then worked for his father until 1841, when he was sent to Paris to study ornamental art.

He then returned to work in the family business. Although Seddon had already decided to become a painter, he continued to study design conscientiously, attending Thomas Leverton Donaldson's lectures on architecture and studying works in the British Museum. In 1848 his design for an ornamental sideboard won him a silver medal from the Society of Arts. Meanwhile, he took lessons at Charles Lucy's drawing school in Camden Town, and attended life classes held by the Artists' Society at Clipstone Street. In the summer of 1849, he went to North Wales, visiting Betws-y-Coed, then a popular destination for artists, where he made his first serious attempts at landscape painting. The next year he went to Barbizon in the forest of Fontainbleau, where he made some studies in oil.

By the beginning of 1848, Seddon had come into contact with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, having met Ford Madox Brown, and during 1850 he worked on a copy of Chaucer at the Court of Edward III in Brown's studio. Around this time he was also involved in the setting up of the North London School of Drawing and Modelling, an art school for working men in Camden Town. from where he painted much of the highly finished landscape Jerusalem and the Valley of Jehoshaphat from the Hill of Evil Counsel. He left the city for France in October 1854.

Although the Valley of Jehosphat was exhibited with the subtitle Painted on the Spot during the Summer and Autumn Months, Seddon continued to work on it in Dinan, along with another oil painting and two watercolours also begun in Jerusalem. He finally finished it, with some help from Hunt, following his return to London in January 1855 and showed it for the first time at an exhibition in his studio in Berners Street in March of the same year. His Eastern subjects were exhibited again the following year in Conduit Street.

In October 1856 Seddon visited Cairo again, but died of dysentery there on 23 November. In 1857 his works were exhibited in the gallery of the Society of Arts, and Jerusalem and the Valley of Jehoshaphat, was purchased by subscription and presented to the National Gallery. John Ruskin pronounced Seddon's views of Egypt and Palestine to be "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".

A memoir of Seddon, by his brother, architect John Pollard Seddon, was published in 1859.