Léhon from Mont Parnasse, Brittany, by Thomas Seddon (1821-1856). Oil on canvas. 22 ¾ x 29 ¾ inches (57.8 x 75.6 cm). Collection of Museo de Art de Ponce, Puerto Rico, object no. 59.0091. Image courtesy of the of Museo de Art de Ponce. Luis A. Ferré Foundation, Inc.
Seddon painted the beautiful Breton countryside in a meticulous Pre-Raphaelite manner during the summer months he spent at Dinan in Brittany in 1853 and 1854. He commenced the painting in June 1853 but took it with him when he returned to London to show to Ford Madox Brown in order to ask for his advice. Seddon returned to Dinan by mid-August and continued to work on the picture until November. He devoted one final day to it in Paris just before he set off for Egypt on his first trip to the Middle East. Madox Brown saw the painting again in 1854 and wrote to Seddon, now in Jerusalem, to say he found it much improved and he praised the figures, which were apparently late additions (Smith 107). When Seddon exhibited it at the Royal Academy in 1854, no. 1291, William Leaf had already purchased it. Seddon's friend the painter George Price Boyce, who had accompanied Seddon to Dinan in June 1853, also showed two views of the Dinan locale at the same Royal Academy exhibition in 1854.
This is one of the largest and most elaborate landscapes Seddon ever painted. It features a panoramic view of Léhon with a view of the ruined monastery of St. Magloire in the left foreground and the Bécherel hills in the distance. The valley in the midground dominates the painting. Léhon is situated just outside of Dinan, while the Bécherel hills are located about twenty kilometers to the south. The right foreground features two women in local Breton costume and a girl, perched on Mont Parnasse, and overlooking the scene below. One of the women might possibly be Emmeline Bulford, the young woman he became engaged to in Dinan and later married in 1855. A religious procession on the road that leads from the monastery enhances the foreground and adds interest to the picture.
Allen Staley feels Seddon's painting was strongly influenced by Madox Brown's landscape An English Autumn Afternoon, which Seddon would have seen in an incomplete state in Brown's studio in 1853:
Like that painting, Seddon's picture shows a group of casual figures on a high foreground promontory, overlooking but distinctly separate from a valley below. In the valley, the tiny figures of a religious procession leaving the ruined monastery correspond to the agricultural labourers in Brown's picture. The horizon is high, and most of the picture is filled with the carefully delineated foliage of the trees in the middle distance, but a further range of hills is visible in the far distance. All this again reflects An English Autumn Afternoon but in comparison Seddon's picture seems less purely visual than Brown's; Seddon appears more concerned with describing than seeing… Throughout Brown's picture there are ambiguities, the result of his apparent unwillingness to impose an order upon the confusion of nature as he saw it. In Seddon's picture everything is clear and precise; Brown's spatial confusion has been resolved, and things fit together in an orderly fashion. Also, reflecting Seddon's relative inexperience as a painter, his picture is stiffer and drier in execution. Nonetheless, Léhon, from Mont Parnasse is far from an inconsiderable achievement. It reveals the painstaking attention to detail that was to characterize Seddon's later Eastern landscapes, as well as an ability to combine detail with a panoramic sense of the landscape as a whole. The religious possession fills only a small part of the picture area, but the entire landscape focuses upon it, and both procession and landscape gain dignity by the juxtaposition. [Staley, Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, 97-98]
Georg Lechner, in contrast, saw contemporary photography as an important influence on this work, a medium which Seddon was obviously interested in. While in the Middle East, for instance, Seddon struck up a friendship with the amateur photographer James Graham. When back in London, Seddon later used some of Graham's photographs of the Holy Land as studies for his pictures. Lechner felt that while Seddon admired photography's new way of capturing reality, he was also aware of its limitations. This was particularly so by the fact that colours, which were translated into gradations of grey in landscape photographs, tended to be obscured as shadow. Lechner concluded: "Seen in isolation Thomas Seddon's Léhon, from Mont Parnasse, may seem a little naïve. When considered in the context of contemporary landscape photography, however, its special significance as a deliberate response to this new means of documentation becomes clear. This is expressed on the one hand by its abandonment of conventional devices to create an illusion of reality and on the other by its painstaking precision" (131).
Bibliography
Lechner, Georg. "On the Pictorial Principles of Pre-Raphaelite Landscape Painting." In Agnes Husslein-Arco and Alfred Weidinger Eds. Sleeping Beauty. Masterpieces of Victorian Painting from Museo De Arte de Ponce. Vienna: Belvedere Publishing, 2010. 127-134.
Seddon, John Pollard. Memoir and Letters of the Late Thomas Seddon, Artist. London: John Nisbet and Co., 1858. 24.
Smith, Alison. In Allen Staley and Christopher Newall Eds. Pre-Raphaelite Vision Truth to Nature. London: Tate Publishing, 2004, cat. 56, 106-07.
Staley, Allen. The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. 73 & 97-98.
Created 27 March 2024