Mr. Seddon, the artist of whose Oriental pictures we had
occasion to speak last year, and who has sent throe of the number to the Academy Exhibition, has collected the remainder, and placed them on view at his studio in Conduit Street. No art can bear a more visible impress of truth; the artist having not only painted the essential parts or the whole of the pictures upon the spots themselves, but aiming, and with success, at the most entire accuracy of detail and specific character. Besides the principal view of the Valley of Jehoshaphat and part of Jerusalem, and the others which we noticed in the former instance, a view of Mount Zion from the South has now been completed; and it exhibits much ex- quisite art, as well as singular faithfulness. The Nebbi Daoud, or tomb of David, and parts of the wall of Jerusalem and the Jews' burial-ground, are included in the landscape ; and in the foreground, a brace of bearded vultures, as thoroughly studied as if for purposes of natural history, are swooping down upon the body of a calf. A second highly characteristic subject is the tomb of a Marabout, or Mohammedan Saint, near Cairo ; its dome interlaced by the blue mid-day shadows of a species of haw- thorn which grows beside it, and its sacred precincts, bristly with pro- fuse cactus, invaded by a set of ropemakors from the city, while a de- vout personage, the soul of slow-pacing gravity, passes it telling his beads. A small picture of Toorah on the Nile, brilliant in sunset- colour, derives an especially picturesque peculiarity from the buf- faloes which are wallowing and snorting in the river, and the thicket of latteen sails which fantastically cross the horizon ; and a water-colour of the Valley of Hinnom, seen from the Bethlehem road, is both tenderly solemn and beautiful, with the shadows of sunset climbing up Mount Zion and the Protestant burial-ground to the right, a soft sky passing from yellow to greenish blues, and almost the same chain of the Moabite mountains which appears in Mr. Hunt's picture of " The Scapegoat." We conceive that few things could call up reminis- cences of Oriental journeying more vividly to the traveller than a visit to Mr. Seddon's studio, or could impart more indisputable information on the subject to the untravelled.
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