Thomas B. Seddon, Boats on the Nile. Watercolour, 14 x 7.5 inches (35.56 cm x 19.05 cm). Private collection, Canada. This watercolour appears to be a sketch painted on site that Thomas Seddon likely used to paint the oil-on-canvas painting titled View on the Nile. [You may use this image for any scholarly or educational purpose without prior permission provided you cite the artist's name, and this web site.]
The sketch was probably painted on site in May 1854 when Seddon and William Holman Hunt travelled down the Nile on a diabeyah on their journey from Cairo with their ultimate destination being Jerusalem. In a letter to his fiancée of May 24, 1854 from Esnee, at the mouth of the Nile, Seddon wrote: "Then we conceived the unfortunate idea of coming by Damietta, which we calculated would occupy about five or six days more than the route by Alexandria, and this we thought would be fully compensated by the sketches we should make, and by a saving of half the expense…The wind was dead against us the whole way, so that we were seven days getting to Damietta" (75). The sketch must have been made early in the journey as Cairo is still visible in the background.
Seddon later used this sketch as the basis for a more finished watercolour worked up in his studio in London and now at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It likely also served as a study for the oil on canvas entitled View on the Nile in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. This work, which was also painted in the studio, does not follow the composition of the sketch quite so closely, however. Staley has described the oil painting as "a rather characterless work," adding that "the chief interest in the picture is in the colour of the Egyptian sunset, and there is relatively little of topographical detail" (103).
Link to Related Material
Bibliography
Staley, Allen. The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape. Oxford: Clarendon press, 1973.
View on the Nile. Art UK. Ashmolean Museum, accession no. WA1944.31.
Created 20 December 2007
Last modified 27 March 2024