Penelope. "Then during the day she wove the large web, which at night she unravelled," The Odyssey. Thomas Seddon (1821-1856). Oil on canvas. 36 x 28 inches (91.4 x 71.1 cm). Private collection. Image courtesy of Sotheby's.
This is the first of Seddon's Pre-Raphaelite pictures, completed in 1851, and his first work accepted by the Royal Academy where it was shown in 1852, no. 339. Unfortunately it was hung in the very top row, where it could only be seen to advantage with the use of opera glasses, so the picture attracted no attention from the critics. This work is unique in Seddon's oeuvre and is quite distinct from the landscapes for which he would later become best known.
Penelope was later shown at the Seddon Memorial Exhibition held at the Society of Arts, London, in May 1857 where John Ruskin in an address "praised it in energetic language, and spoke of it as a picture which had given him a high opinion of Mr. Seddon's genius" (Seddon 17). Seddon's friend Ford Madox Brown was the major influence on this work, although Christopher Newall feels contemporary French painting that he would have seen during his visits to France also influenced it (65). Brown had exerted a long-standing influence on Seddon's work and Seddon had worked in his studio for a period in the 1850s, including making copies of Brown's pictures such as Chaucer at the Court of Edward III.
After Seddon's death Brown worked on Penelope to bring it to a more satisfactory state of finish. In his diary for 17 January 1858 he wrote: "I forgot to mention that about the month of April I gave two weeks to finishing poor Seddon's picture of Penelope" (199). According to Virginia Surtees it was D. G. Rossetti's idea that each of Seddon's unfinished works be completed by one of his friends prior to their being shown at the Seddon Memorial Exhibition at the Society of Arts and that in its present state Penelope was almost more Brown's than Seddon's (199, n.9). It is therefore ironic that Ruskin was unaware of Brown's contributions, considering his unfavourable opinion of Brown's work, when he commented "while beforehand he had only regarded Seddon as a landscape painter of great promise, he now saw by the Penelope that he was also a great figure painter" (Hunt II: 128). The painting initially belonged to George Wilson of Redgrave Hall, Suffolk.
The subject of this painting is Penelope, the wife of Odysseus from Homer's The Odyssey. Penelope spent twenty years faithfully waiting for her husband's return from the Trojan War, even though he was felt by many to have died at sea during his return voyage. In order to delay her marriage to one of the many suitors vying for her hand during this waiting period, she came up with an ingenious scheme declaring that she would marry only when she had finished weaving a burial shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes. Every night she undid the work she accomplished that day in order to further hamper the suitors who pressed their advances. Her subterfuge, which she maintained for ten years, was finally exposed when a maidservant revealed why the garment had never been completed.
The artist's brother, the architect J. P. Seddon, in his Memoir and Letters of the Late Thomas Seddon wrote of the lengths his brother went to in order to create the painting:
The first thing he undertook was the completion of a picture commenced some time before. The subject is "Penelope." In it she is represented sitting by the side of her web, at early sunrise, near an open window, and resting after her night's work of unraveling what she has done on the day preceding. She is dressed in a loose purple robe, with her feet resting on a leopard's skin. Suspended from a loom is the web, shewing the heads of Ulysses and his companions. Her damsels are asleep in an adjoining apartment, separated, partly by a curtain, and lighted by a lamp, the rays of which are paling before the beams of the morning. The pains he took to secure truthfulness in a subject which, by its very nature, seemed to preclude it, were extraordinary. He constructed a model of the apartment in which the heroine is represented, with an opening for the window, with the curtain partition, and with the loom itself; and he hung up a taper in order to study the effect of the double light; and at the British Museum and elsewhere he studied most carefully the costumes and manners of the Greeks. There is considerable simplicity in the composition, but it has a fine breadth and harmony of rich colouring; and many of the accessories, such as the leopard's skin, are painted elaborately and powerfully. [16-17]
Bibliography
Hunt, William Holman. Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. London: MacMillan & Co. Ltd., 1905.
Newall, Christopher. Victorian & Edwardian Art. London: Sotheby's (November 15, 2011), lot 74. 64-65.
Seddon, John Pollard. Memoir and Letters of the Late Thomas Seddon, Artist. London: John Nisbet and Co., 1858. 16-17.
Staley, Allen. The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. 97 & 104.
Surtees, Virginia Ed. The Diary of Ford Madox Brown. New Haven and London: Yale University press, 1981.
The Joe Setton Collection: From Pre-Raphaelites to Last Romantics. London: Christie's (10 December 2020), lot 25. https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6290743
"The Society of Arts." The Art Journal, New Series III (1 June 1857): 198.
Victorian and Edwardian Art. London: Sotheby's (15 November 2011): lot 74, 64-65. https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2011/victorian-edwardian-art/lot.74.html
Wood, Christopher. The Pre-Raphaelites. London: Seven Dials, 1981.
Created 27 March 2024