MR. THOMAS SEDDON.
Death has been busy among painters as the year closes. The loss of Delaroche is an European loss. Recently we recorded the blighted pro- mise of Mr. Herbert junior; last week, the loss of Mr. Wien, an artist who, though well out of the stage of mere promise, might confidently have been expected to show forth the valuable gifts he possessed in a maturer form; Frederick Nash, the water-colour artist so long popular for his designs of old buildings, is gone also • so is Mr. David Gibson,. a young painter who, like Mr. Herbert, exhibited his first conspicuous pic- ture this year; and now Mr. Thomas Seddon, at the early age of thirty- five.
We have spoken more than once of the works which Mr. Seddon pro- duced; works remarkable not only in themselves, but from the condi- tions of their production. Engaged in his youth in designs for indus- trial art, he had only within the last few years adopted painting, in the ordinary sense of fine art proper, as his profession. . He entered upon the study with determined energy ; and in the Royal Academy exhibi- tion of 1851 or 1862 showed his first picture, Penelope at her web. The amount of aptitude and success in this picture would have justified the artist in being less strict with himself than he chose to be : he modestly resolved to lay aside for the present the treatment of inventive subjects of human life, and to go through severe discipline in landscape. A. few pictures from Brittany and the North of France prepared him for en- tering, upon a new field of study with assurance of profit. In 1854 he accompanied Mr. Holman Hunt to Egypt and Palestine, but returned in 1855. This autumn he again set off for the East; and he had scarcely settled down to his labours at Cairo when he was attacked with his last illness : he died there, on the 23d November. The works which Mr. Seddon brought home from the East in 1855 are those upon which we have more particularly dwelt heretofore, and to which we would again point. Their artistic qualities are of a high order, —pleasant harmonious colour, constantly in the water-colours, and often in the oil -pictures ; design Manly and careful • and an unvitiated eye both for tho simple in its simplicity and the picturesque in its pic- turesqueness. But it is especially upon the supreme quality of truth at Mr. Seddon's excellence depends, In this respect, we believe that no landscape of great distant historic scenes, whether of the British or of a foreign school, is capable of sustaining a comparison with his : every cir- cumstance of sky, land, and water, every effect of colour and atmosphere, every incident of national or animal life, is represented exactly as the artist saw it, and no otherwise, without one tittle of either "cook- ing" or slurring. The pictures have that highest privilege of a ppeerrffectly truthful man, that whatever they assert, whether con- ed or unconfirmed, whether probable-looking or improbable, can be taken-implicitly upon trust. Mr. Seddon may be regarded as the initia- tor bf a new school in- the treatment of historic landscape according to the single unvarying principle of the seen fact. His work will assuredly survive him in Its influence upon others; even his own individual productions, brief as his- artistic career as been, are of such mark as to insure their being sought after and prized.
Mr. Seddon was known to a large circle of friends, and especially va- lued for his high_honour and many pleasant social qualities.
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