Thomas Seddon

Thomas Seddon (London, 28 August 1821 – Cairo, 23 November 1856) was an English landscape painter associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who painted colourful and highly detailed scenes of Brittany, Egypt and Jerusalem.

He was born on 28 August 1821 in Aldersgate Street in the City of London, the son of a well-known cabinet-maker of the same name. He was educated at a school conducted on the Pestalozzian system by the Rev. Joseph Barron at Stanmore, and then worked for his father until 1841, when he was sent to Paris to study ornamental art.

He then returned to work in the family business. Although he had already decided to become a painter, he continued to study design conscientiously, attending Thomas Leverton Donaldson's lectures on architecture and studying works in the British Museum. In 1848 his design for an ornamental sideboard won him a silver medal from the Society of Arts. Meanwhile, he took lessons at Charles Lucy's drawing school in Camden Town, and attended life classes held by the Artists' Society at Clipstone Street. In the summer of 1849, he went to North Wales, visiting Betws-y-Coed, then a popular destination for artists, where he made his first serious attempts at landscape painting. The next year he went to Barbizon in the forest of Fontainbleau, where he made some studies in oil.

By the beginning of 1848 he had come into contact with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, having met Ford Madox Brown, and during 1850 he worked on a copy of Chaucer at the Court of Edward III in Brown's studio. Around this time he was also involved in the setting up of the North London School of Drawing and Modelling, an art school for working men in Camden Town. At the end of 1850 he suffered a severe attack of rheumatic fever, during which – apparently close to death – he was reconciled with organised religion, having stopped attending church some years before; according to his brother's memoir "those that knew him best regard[ed] that sickness as the turning point in his spiritual history, and the commencement of his practical Christianity." Just after this illness he left his father's business, which was about to be relocated to Gray's Inn Road. He moved to rooms in Percy Street, off Tottenham Court Road, where he completed a painting of figure subject, Penelope, which was his first work to be shown at the Royal Academy. He visited Wales again in late 1851 and the following summer went to Dinan in Brittany where his sisters were staying; a landscape painted there was shown at the Royal Academy the next year.

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