The Sun.
London, England, 1856-06-02 00:00:00

SEDDONS ORIENTAL PAINTINGS.

Everybody at all alive to the progress of mo-
dern art in London is perfectly well acquainted
by this time with Mr. Holman Hunt's extraordi-
nary picture of " The Scapegoat," No. 398 in the

current Royal Academy Catalogue. Everybody
who has seen it [and who has not ?) retains a
lively sense of that " glory of colour" which shines
forth " chiefest" among its more remarkable attri-

butes—apple-green, pink, white, yellow, vermil-
lion—of which Mr. Ruskin observes very truth-
fully that it " lights the room far away, just as
Turner's used to do " (" Notes, &c., ii. 1856, p.
31)—aud of which same " glory of colour" there
lives a long while afterwards a brilliant image
upon, so to speak, the retina of the beholder's
imagination. Everybody who has seen " The
Scapegoat" remembers this. Knows the history
of the manner of its production. Is aware that
it was all painted from Life and from Nature.
That that Goat is the effigy of an actual living,
creature—so actual and so living that hence posi-
tively the failure of the portrait as a specimen of
hair-painting and hoof-painting—the artist finding
it "impossible to get the animal to stand still for
a moment in an attitude indicating utter weari-
ness." Everybody who at all cares for such
things is conscious by this time, moreover, that
those salt-encrusted shallows in the foreground
are the salt-encrusted shallows of the Dead Sea,
that those mountains beyond are the veritable
mountains of Edom, and that shallows and moun-
tains alike were painted by Mr. Holman Hunt on the
spot, within sight of the objects themselves, at a place
called Oosdoom. There the authoritative Oxford
Graduate himself has told us in his own eloquent
fashion—The young English painter encamped
upon the actual shore of the fatal waters ; set up
his easel upon their margin hard by the opening
of his little tent ; " pursued his work with pa-
tience through months of solitude ; and painted,
crag by crag, the purple mountains of Moab, and,
grain by grain, the pale ashes of Gomorrah." To
enhance the strangeness of all which as constitut-
ing an incident in the annals of the development
of modern art, this same young English artist
having arrived in Palestine with a view to the
accomplishment of this very singular undertaking
"with the cloud of Eastern war gathering to the
north of him, and involving for most men, accord-
ing to their adventurous er timid temper, either
an interest which would at once have attracted
them to its immediate field, or a terror which
would have driven them from work in its threat-
ening neighbourhood, he pursues calmly his origi-
nal purpose : and while the hills of the Crimea
were white with tents of war, and the fiercest
passions of the nations of Europe burned in high
funereal flames over their innumerable dead, one
peaceful English tent was pitched beside a ship-
less sea ; and the whole strength of an English
heart spent in painting a weary goat dying upon
its salt sand." (Notes, &c., ii., 1856, p. 27.)
We have here quoted at length a very striking
portion of the earnest tribute offered by Mr. John
Ruskin to the industry of Mr. Holman Hunt, to
his patience, to his ardour, to his genius, to his
skill—as they have been all more or less mani-
fested of late in his recent search in the Holy
Lands after the True at least, if not (at any rate
to the popular apprehension) in any marked
or successful manner, after the Beautiful.
We have done so under the apparently
incongruous heading of " Seddon's Oriental
Paintings"—because Mr. Holman Hunt was
preceded in his singular and remarkable journey
with his brushes and pigments, his easel and pal-
lette, into the region of the Holy Places, by
another young English artist, one who was so far
Mr. Hunt's pioneer in Palestine, as he became
afterwards, we believe, his companion, and as he
may ultimately prove (as Mr. Hunt himself might
not disdain to regard him) a rival as well as a
contemporary. Mr. Thomas Seddon, as we have
already intimated, arrived in the Holy Land before
Mr. Holman Hunt touched its shores in his
eccentric expedition to paint the famous picture
of " The Scapegoat" at Oosdootn. Mr. Seddon
returned from Palestine later than Mr. Hunt--
bringing with him as evidence of his extraordinary
industry during the interval of his toil and travel,
of his labours of love and- of his journeyings of
enthusiasm, not one painting alone, but several
of a really remarkable character. Evidence these
pictures afford, moreover, be it said at once, not
simply of his industry, but with this very laud-
able quality of others yet more noteworthy and
entitled to more extended and elevated admiration
—evidence, we mean, for example, of the keenest
observation of nature, of the most reverent sense
of the sanctity of the awful localities depicted, of
the liveliest appreciation of the beautiful whether
on the earth or in the heavens, to say nothing of
the artistic aptitude displayed by Mr. Seddon as
a colourist of very rare accomplishment. Several
of his oriental pictures, now on " private view "
in Conduit-street (No. 52), we have recently had
the gratification of examining—works of art im-
portant enough though probably not numerous
enough to have been catalogued with some degree
of particularity. Unassisted by the mechanical
aid of a printed list--a list which possesses at least
this advantage, that it gives to each picture in a
collection the benefit, so to express it, of " a local
habitation and a name," admitting of the possi-
bility of explicit reference our recollec-
tion of the oriental paintings of Mr. Sed-
don admits only of a reference to them
not so much in detail as in generality. One ex-
quisite view there is—looking towards Jerusalem
—a view enabling the spectator to gaze (without
seeing it) across the hidden pool of Siloam—a
picture with a pomegranate tree in flower, bloom-
ing in the foreground, and under its shadows the
sparsely sprinkled grass blades shooting up in
summer time from the loose soil, blossoming out
here and there into the strongest varieties of the
wild thistle. Another and a smaller picture, one
simply portraying the figure of a loaded camel in
the wilderness, attended by its driver—reminds
one when gazing at it (high praise we take this
to be) of J. F. L3WIS, the distinguished President
of the Old Society of Water Colourists. It is ob-
servable by the way that Mr. Seddon has this great
merit, in common with the more eminent among,
our rising pre-Raphaelites, that he is no conven-
tionalist. If he sees, as he does see (and as every-
body else sees, but hardly anybody else ventures
to show that ho sees) shadows of " blue" instead
of the everlasting shadows of " brown"—he ho-
nestly paints blue shadows, and not the old, blun-
dering, bungling, untruthful brown shadows. If
he sees a bright green colour in the sky—he paints
it bright green—as Turner used to do, as Hunt
has just done in the variegated sheen on the Moab
mountains. And how Mr. Seddon—who no less,
in his way, than Mr.
Holman Hunt, or Mr.
Everett Miller's, can think for himself, and see
for himself, and not through tho old distorting
loopholes of conventionality—how Mr. Seddon
can paint, let his nobler picture of " The Sphinx"
tell, and his yet nobler pain ting:of "The Pyramids,"
as they loom before the eyes of the traveller at
sundown, with an aureole of glory shooting in
great beams up into the heavens, and a wondrous
twilight settling down over the Nile-flooded shal-
lows of Egypt—works of art these two last men-
tioned--that would have gladdened the heart, and
revived the memory, and rejoiced the imagination
of poor Elliot Warburton.

A RUN OF SALMON.—Th!:, John o'Groat Journal
says.:—Owing to the heavy rams which we have had for
the last few days, which afforded the salmon an oppor-
tunity of making for the sea, a number of spectators were
attracted to the river by some boys purshing the fish
through the water in hundreds. The scene was truly
Pleasant, the fish being so large and numerous. Never
have there been seen, within the recollection of any of
the fishermen connected with the river, such a number
of fish.

THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE.—Letters and papers
from the Cape of Good Hope to the Bth of April have
came to hand, but they do not contain any political
news of interest. Mr. Solomon carried a motion in the
House of Assembly that a committee be appointed to
consider the best means for promoting immigration, in
accordance with the suggestions made by his Excellency
the Governor in his speech on the opening of Parlia-
ment. The bill for preventing the spread of infectious
or contagious diseases, introduced by Government, has
been promptly considered, and there is every evidence
that the members are fully aware of the importance of
such a measure.