View on the Nile near Cairo

Thomas Seddon

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Seddon here uses a heightened pastel palette to evoke a sunset over the Nile. A walled village and palm trees at left are silouetted against a lemon sky, while tiny buildings in Cairo gleam pink and violet in the right distance, behind diabeyahs described in similar tones. The artist visited the middle East between 1853 and 1854 with his friend and teacher William Holman Hunt. Adopting local dress, the young man spent four months in Cairo, then sailed down the Nile with Hunt, painting watercolors from the boat. This strikingly beautiful drawing applies Pre-Raphaelite techniques, and likely was made in the studio. It relates closely to an oil at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Works that Seddon exhibited in London in 1855 prompted the critic John Ruskin to declare: "Before I saw these, I never thought it possible to attain such an effect of tone and light without sacrificing truth to color." Shortly after returning to Cairo in 1857, with a string of commissions in hand, Seddon died tragically of dysentery.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art