Mount Zion. Thomas B. Seddon. Oil on canvas, 17.75 x 13.25 inches (45.1 cm x 33.7 cm). Private collection, Canada. [You may use this image for any scholarly or educational purpose without prior permission provided you cite the painter's name (Thomas Seddon), and this website.]
Mount Zion is the Western Hill in Jerusalem located just outside of the walls of the Old City, and separated from the lower Eastern Hill by the central valley. Mount Zion was the highest point in ancient Jerusalem. When Seddon arrived in Jerusalem in June 1854 he pitched his tent on the hill south of Mount Zion, looking up the Valley of Jehoshaphat. Seddon's Mount Zion is one of the two oil paintings he started in the Holy Land, the other being Jerusalem and the Valley of Jehoshaphat, as well as two watercolours. He mentions in a letter to his fiancée Emmeline Bulford of June 10 that he had already started on the picture. In a subsequent letter of 5 July he writes: "The weather lately has been cloudless, but this morning beautiful white clouds are chasing one another from the west, and their shadows scudding over the rounded hills will, I hope, give me a great additional beauty for my small picture of Mount Zion. Thank God, I am painting successfully" (99). A handwritten note signed by Thomas Seddon on the reverse side of Mount Zion states: "Mount Zion seen from the south. On its top is Stebbi Daoud [Maqam Al-Nabi Daoud] where is David's tomb. Beyond are the walls of Jerusalem and in from the Valley of Hinnom. The Lammer gayer in the foreground were shot there, where the carcass is. There the Eagles are gathered together." The Lammer geyer [Lammergeier], also known as a bearded vulture, was a large eaglelike vulture.
Seddon continued to work on the picture when back in London, including adding the two vultures to the foreground. As Seddon mentions in a letter of 16 February 1855 to his fiancée: "I have heard from Dr. Sim, at Jerusalem. He says he has shot me a grand eagle, four feet high, and eight feet from wing to wing, which he is sending over to me in a box; it will enable me to put a grand foreground into my small picture of Mount Zion" (133). In a later letter of 10 March 1855 Seddon writes: "spent all yesterday in placing the great eagle for my picture of Mount Zion. To-day I have been trying to draw him, but without succeeding in satisfying myself; however, I hope to do better on Monday" (135). In a letter to Emmeline of 14 May 1855 he writes: "I will try and get to the sea-side for sometime this summer. I have a rocky foreground to paint in my picture of Mount Zion, which I could do at the sea-side" (147).
When the work was shown at the semi-public exhibition of Seddon's Orientalist pictures held at his studio at No. 14 Berners Street in 1855, W. M. Rossetti in The Spectator felt it was one of the best in the show: "Mount Zion, not yet entirely finished, is one of the most finely painted of the series" (392). Mount Zion was subsequently exhibited in the autumn of 1856 at the Liverpool Academy and was one of two works by Seddon exhibited at the First Pre-Raphaelite Group Exhibition held at 4 Russell Place, Fitzroy Square, that opened in late May 1857. When Seddon later exhibited his works again at his studio in Conduit Street in 1856 W. M. Rossetti wrote of this work in The Spectator:
No art can bear a more visible impress of truth; the artist having not only painted the essential parts of the whole of the pictures upon the spots themselves, but aiming, and with success, at the most accuracy of detail and specific character. Besides the principal view of the valley of Jehoshaphat and part of Jerusalem, and the others which we noticed in the former instance, a view of Mount Zion from the South has now been completed; and it exhibits much exquisite art, as well as singular faithfulness. The Nebbi Daoud, or tomb of David, and parts of the wall of Jerusalem and the Jews' burial-ground, are included in the landscape; and in the foreground, a brace of bearded vultures, as thoroughly studied as if for purposes of natural history, are swooping down upon the body of a calf" (571).
When Seddon's pictures were later shown in his memorial exhibition at the Society of Arts in 1857 W. M. Rossetti, again in The Spectator, commented: "We have only to repeat, regarding the pictures, that they display art of no common stamp, united with accuracy so consummate as to entitle them to be considered the first fruits of the new principle of undeviating fidelity applied to high historic landscape" (503).
Details
Bibliography
Rossetti, William Michael, "Fine Arts. Oriental Pictures by Mr. Seddon." The Spectator XXVIII (14 April 1855): 392.
Rossetti, William Michael, "Oriental Pictures by Mr. Seddon." The Spectator XXIX (24 May 1856): 571.
Rossetti, William Michael "Mr. Seddon's Pictures." The Spectator XXX (9 May 1857): 503.
Seddon, John Pollard. Memoir and Letters of the Late Thomas Seddon, Artist. London: John Nisbet, 1858.
Created 20 December 2007
Last modified (commentary added) 27 March 2024