The Mountains of Moab.[The Hills of Moab and the Valley of Hinnom] Watercolour on paper; 9 15/16 x 13 7/8 inches (25.1 x 35.2 cm). Collection of Tate Britain, reference no. NO5922. Image kindly provided by the author.
The mountains of Moab are located in Jordan some forty to fifty miles east of Jerusalem. Seddon described his first view of this scene in a letter of June 10, 1854 to his fiancée Emmeline Bulford: "Behind the city [Jerusalem] rose the Mount of Olives, with the grand range of the mountains of Moab, beyond the Dead Sea, half veiled by the mist, now rosy from the light of the setting sun" (91). Seddon was obviously very happy to see hills again after experiencing the desolate desert sands of Egypt. In a letter of June 25, 1854, written again to his fiancée from his tent on the Hill of Evil Counsel, he described the subject of this watercolour: "To-day I have been going on with a water-colour drawing of the mountains of Moab, beyond the Dead Sea, looking down the Valley of Hinnom. I have taken them half an hour before sunset, when they are bathed in a mist of rosy light, while the valley in front is in shadow. It never does to be too confident, but, if it is finished as it is begun, it will be the best water-colour landscape that I have done" (94). In a later letter to her of September 26, 1854 he writes to describe the beauty of the country around Jerusalem:
Independently of the undying interest of its associations, the country round is extremely beautiful. The view of the Dead Sea, with a long range of Moab mountains, is the most striking I have ever seen; they are now half-veiled by a thin vapour, through which the sun guilds every projection, while the deep shadows, softened by the mist, give it more the appearance of a mysterious cloud-land, and a vaporous unreality, which makes you doubt whether they can be solid earth like the nearer hills. This will last, I am told, the whole autumn. In the spring, I believe, they are clear and sharply defined, as if close at hand. [125-26]
The finished watercolour shows the Mountains of Moab beyond the Dead Sea and features the light and colours to be seen as sunset is approaching. The buildings seen in the watercolour in the upper left are of the village of Siloam located on the Mount of Offense. The colours reflect the colours described in a letter from Seddon to his fiancée of June 10, 1854: "and, as the sun sinks, the projections become rose-coloured, and the chasms a deep violet, yet still misty. When the sun left them, the hazy air above them became a singular green colour, and the sky over rosy red, gradually melting into the blue" (92).
Seddon did not complete this watercolour in Jerusalem because he was eager to return to see Emmeline at Dinan in France. There has been speculation that Hunt may have finished this work on Seddon's behalf. In a letter of 31 January 1855 from William Holman Hunt in Jerusalem to Seddon, Hunt writes: "I worked two or three evenings on your sketch but required another evening when I went away to the Dead Sea" (qtd. in Landow 167-68). Hunt promised to complete it before he left Jerusalem. After Seddon's death D. G. Rossetti had proposed that each of his friends should take up one of Seddon's unfinished works and bring it to completion. Brown therefore worked to finish Penelope while Hunt wrote in his reminiscences: "but the other pictures were left without additional work, partly, perhaps, because most of them could be finished only in the East. As I was hard pressed by my own work and had given time to complete a watercolour of his when he left Syria so suddenly in 1854, I did not take part in this work" (II: 128). Although Hunt might possibly be referring to The Well of Enrogel, both G. P. Landow and Allen Staley feel The Mountains of Moab is the more likely possibility. Newall has pointed out its similarity to Hunt's watercolours The Plain of Rephaim from Mount Zion or The Dead Sea from Siloam (Wilcox and Newall, Victorian Landscape Watercolours, 86). Allen Staley felt this work had a richness of colour unusual in Seddon's other works: "The breadth of effect seem sufficiently unlike the drier and more linear treatment of his other known works to suggest that it may be as much a product of Hunt's hand as his own" (Pre-Raphaelite Vision, 112). Judith Bronkhurst thinks Seddon's watercolour may have been conceived as a pendant to Hunt's morning view The Dead Sea from Siloam, showing the terrain just before sunrise (67).
This picture was one of those that Seddon exhibited at his studio in Conduit Street in 1856. W. M. Rossetti in The Spectator, when reviewing that semi-public exhibition, pointed out this particular watercolour for praise: "A watercolour of the Valley of Hinnom, seen from the Bethlehem road, is both tenderly solemn and beautiful, with the shadows of sunset climbing up Mount Zion and the Protestant burial-ground to the right, a soft sky passing from yellow to greenish blues, and almost the same chain of the Moabite mountains which appears in Mr. Hunt's picture of The Scapegoat" (571).
Bibliography
Bronkhurst, Judith. William Holman Hunt. A Catalogue Raisonné. Drawings and Watercolours. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006, cat. D112, 67.
Hunt, William Holman. Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood Vols. I & II. London: MacMillan & Co. Ltd., 1905.
Landow, George P. "William Holman Hunt's Letters to Thomas Seddon." Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, Manchester LXVI (1983): 139-72.
Rossetti, William Michael, "Oriental Pictures by Mr. Seddon." The Spectator XXIX (24 May 1856): 571.
Seddon, John Pollard. Memoir and Letters of the Late Thomas Seddon, Artist. London: John Nisbet and Co., 1858.
Staley, Allen and Christopher Newall Eds. Pre-Raphaelite Vision Truth to Nature. London: Tate Publishing, 2004, cat. 62, 112-13.
Staley, Allen. The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape. Oxford: Clarendon press, 1973.
Wilcox, Scott and Christopher Newall. Victorian Landscape Watercolours. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1992, cat. 22, 86.
Tromans, Nicholas. "The Oriental Perspective." The Lure of the East. British Orientalist Paintings. London: Tate Publishing, 2008, 108-109.
Created 28 March 2024