The Well of Enrogel. Thomas Seddon (1821-1856). Watercolour and gouache. 9 3/4 x 13 3/4 inches (24.7 x 34.9 cm). Collection of the Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston. Image kindly provided by the author.
The Well of Enrogel was in a valley immediately to the east of Seddon's campsite on the Hill of Evil Counsel with the Mount of Offense rising on the other side. The location is mentioned a number of times in various books of the Old Testament, which made it of interest to Seddon, who also referred to it as "Joab's well." This was the second of the two watercolours Seddon began in Jerusalem, the other being The Mountains of Moab. In a letter of 25 June 1854, written to his fiancée Emmeline Bulford from his tent on the Hill of Evil Counsel, Seddon described the subject of this watercolour and the watercolour of The Mountains of Moab: "I began that, and another, of Joab's well, and the great threshing-floor in front, with the oxen treading the corn, as water-colour is not so laborious as oil" (94).
In a later letter of 2 July 1854, Seddon gives details about the threshing process shown in his watercolour:
Just under where I am the harvesting operations are going on all day long, as it is their principal threshing-floor; all the wheat is collected there, being brought either on men's heads, or on donkeys. The proprietor places his own in a heap by itself, and men are appointed by the village to guard it by day and night. The threshing is still more rude than in Egypt, and a very slow process. They drive cattle and donkeys over it in a circle, which reduces it into powder, and then they throw it up in the air in the morning and afternoon breeze, to blow away the chaff. [103]
Closer view of the scene around the well.
Allen Staley speculated that the man shown in the foreground of the watercolour, which shows only the upper half of his body, may be one of the men the village had appointed to guard the wheat waiting to be threshed (Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, 112). James Graham's contemporary photographs of this locale confirm the accuracy of the scene portrayed.
This watercolour was included in the semi-public exhibition of Seddon's Orientalist works shown at his studio at No. 14 Berners Street in 1855. W. M. Rossetti, who reviewed the exhibition in The Spectator, pointed out this work for praise: "A third Scriptural view is the Threshing-floor of En-rogel; excellently done in watercolours, which Mr. Seddon uses with a somewhat warmer effect than oils, and remarkable for showing no horizon, the hills shutting in the view to its highest point. It was in the well of En-rogel that Jonathan and Ahimaaz lay concealed to evade the hostile army of Absolom" (392). Dante Gabriel Rossetti also saw the work at this exhibition and complimented it in a letter to William Holman Hunt of 30 January 1855: "I was at Seddon's and saw his pictures, and agree with what you said of them. Very good they certainly are in many aways – especially as facsimile views, in which respect I dare say they are the most accurate to be seen in England, but by candlelight at any rate they all seemed, though in some ways good...The thing which interested me most was a water-colour of a threshing floor, which is full of the most poetical looking things, but the colour always, at least as the light showed it, deficient to a certain degree" (15).
Either Seddon or his widow gave this watercolour to Ford Madox Brown who later used it as the basis for the distant landscape seen in the background of his The Coat of Many Colours [Jacob and Joseph's Coat]. Brown, of course, had never been to the Holy Land so Seddon's depiction of this scene proved invaluable to him.
Bibliography
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The Formative Years II. 1855-1862. William E. Fredeman Ed. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002, letter 55.6, 12-16.
Rossetti, William Michael, "Fine Arts. Oriental Pictures by Mr. Seddon." The Spectator XXVIII (April 14, 1855): 392.
Seddon, John Pollard. Memoir and Letters of the Late Thomas Seddon, Artist. London: John Nisbet and Co., 1858.
Staley, Allen. The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape. Oxford: Clarendon press, 1973.
Staley, Allen and Christopher Newall Eds. Pre-Raphaelite Vision Truth to Nature. London: Tate Publishing, 2004, cat. 61, 112.
Wilcox, Scott and Christopher Newall. Victorian Landscape Watercolours. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1992, cat. 23, 87.
Created 28 March 2024