View on the Nile near Cairo

ca. 1855

Not on view

Seddon here uses a heightened pastel palette to evoke a sunset over the Nile. A walled village and palm trees at left are silouetted against a lemon sky, while tiny buildings in Cairo gleam pink and violet in the right distance, behind diabeyahs described in similar tones. The artist visited the middle East between 1853 and 1854 with his friend and teacher William Holman Hunt. Adopting local dress, the young man spent four months in Cairo, then sailed down the Nile with Hunt, painting watercolors from the boat. This strikingly beautiful drawing applies Pre-Raphaelite techniques, and likely was made in the studio. It relates closely to an oil at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Works that Seddon exhibited in London in 1855 prompted the critic John Ruskin to declare: "Before I saw these, I never thought it possible to attain such an effect of tone and light without sacrificing truth to color." Shortly after returning to Cairo in 1857, with a string of commissions in hand, Seddon died tragically of dysentery.

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Title: View on the Nile near Cairo
Artist: Thomas Seddon (British, London 1821–1856 Cairo)
Date: ca. 1855
Medium: Watercolor over graphite with stopping out, heightened with gouache (bodycolor)
Dimensions: Sheet: 7 9/16 × 14 1/16 in. (19.2 × 35.7 cm)
Classification: Drawings
Credit Line: Purchase, Brooke Russell Astor Bequest, 2013
Object Number: 2013.75
Curatorial Department: Drawings and Prints

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