Seymour Kirkup

Seymour Stocker Kirkup (1788–1880) was an English painter and antiquarian, resident in Italy from 1816.

Born in London, he was the eldest child of Joseph Kirkup, a jeweller and diamond merchant there. He was admitted a student of the Royal Academy in 1809, and obtained a medal in 1811 for a drawing in its antique school. He became at this period acquainted with William Blake and Benjamin Haydon.

About 1816 Kirkup began to suffer from pulmonary weakness, and; after his father's death, visited Italy. He eventually settled there, living some time at Rome, where his friend Charles Eastlake was studying. There he knew John Keats (but missed his funeral on 26 February 1821, ill in bed) and in 1822 attended the funeral of Percy Bysshe Shelley. At Florence he lived for many years in a house on the River Arno, adjoining the Ponte Vecchio.

Kirkup became a leader of a literary circle in Florence. He collected a library, of which a catalogue was printed in 1871, and maintained a copious correspondence. Walter Savage Landor, Robert and Elizabeth Browning, Giovanni Aubrey Bezzi, Edward John Trelawny, Joseph Severn were his friends. As a keen student of Dante, he was a disciple of Gabriele Rossetti.

On Italian unification, Kirkup was created cavaliere of the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus; he subsequently affected the title "barone". He was short, and good-looking as a young man; in later life, eccentric in his dress and habits, and deaf. He was a believer in spiritualism, and a follower of the medium Daniel Dunglas Home.

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