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Jerusalem and the Valley of Jehoshaphat from the Hill of Evil Counsel

1854-1855

Thomas Seddon

Tate Gallery, London

Seddon journeyed to the Holy Land via Egypt, where he was joined by Hunt, arriving in Jerusalem on 3 June 1854. Rejecting grandiloquent, well-represented sights, he encamped at Aceldama, the Field of Blood', on the Hill of Evil Counsel to the south of the city, and selected a view that encompassed the Mount of Olives and the Garden of Gethsemane, the scene of Christ's mental agony before the crucifixion and a choice which may have been inspired by the artist's reading of John Keble's Christian Year (first published 1827). The Valley of Jehoshaphat was also believed to be the site of the Last Judgment, but this tranquil landscape with its inhabitants going about their everyday activities hardly gives an indication of this. – Seddon, a pious Christian, had been deeply moved by his first sight of the Holy City and his painting was undertaken as a quest to discover the Bible in the physical actuality of the place, the detailed exegesis which accompanied the work at the Liverpool Academy in 1856 providing verbal testimony to the historic associations of the location. Seddon also saw his work as a corrective to what he felt were false, unchristian representations published by missionary groups such as the Christian Knowledge Society. Adopting a plateau format and a high vantage point he delineated the whole scene with dazzling clarity, the sharpness of each feature conveying a sense of seeing for the first time, and the sleeping Arab allowing the artist total possession of the view. The picture can further be seen as an exercise in self discipline and sacrifice involving approximately 120 days' work, up to eleven hours a day, during which time Seddon endured extreme heat, dust, insects, and the possibility of attack. Indeed the intricate patterns of loose semi-consolidated sandstone on the left are rendered with a feverish intensity, as are the blue tree shadows that flicker up the hillside, While the lack of focus took place are lost' (Seddon 1858, p.98). This comprehension of a mutable environment brought with it a sense both of loss and of future potential, for despite his appreciation of the beauty of the countryside, Seddon felt the present-day Arabs lacked the industry of the Jews of old which had made the Jerusalem of antiquity 'the garden of the whole earth' (ibid., p.85). Years later Hunt, too, lamented how their original sight of the city had since been ruined by 'ungainly constructions disfiguring a spot whose memories are forever linked with the story of Calvary' (Hunt 1905, 1, p. 402). – The painting was unfinished when Seddon left for Dinan on 19 October and was completed in Brittany with the aid of sketches and probably some photographs by James Graham whom Seddon had met in Jerusalem. Secretary for the London Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge among the Jews, Graham practiced photography as a means of harnessing optical with religious truth. Writing to his fiancée Emmeline Burford from his tent, Seddon mentioned how much he valued Graham's photographs but cautioned 'they will never supplant the pencil, for there is much in photographs that is false; the greens and yellows become nearly as black as the shadows, so that you often cannot distinguish which is shadow and which grass' (Seddon 1858, p. 149). – Although the picture was never termed photographic as such, a similar aim of self-effacement or of subordinating pictorial effect to topographical accuracy was perceived by Ruskin (Works, XIV, p. 465), and Ford Madox Brown felt that truth had been attained to the detriment of beauty (Surtees 1981, p. 117). Hunt's feeling that Seddon's picture was little more than a map was echoed by other criticisms of the skeletally dry landscape. However, the former English Consul at Jerusalem, who viewed the painting in Seddon's studio, found in it an ambience appropriately 'utterly unlike the thick atmosphere of England' (Seddon 1858, p. 149), and the Scottish photographer John Cramb contested that in the Middle East 'Generally the air is so free from moisture that objects miles off are as sharp and intense as those in the immediate foreground' (BJP 1861, quoted Bartram 1985, p. 108). Following Seddon's death in 1856 a subscription fund was launched to purchase Jerusalem and the Valley of Jehoshaphat for the National Gallery, and so in 1857 the painting became the first Pre-Raphaelite work to enter a public collection.

Quoted from Allen Staley and Christopher Newall, Pre-Raphaelite Vision: Truth to Nature (London: Tate Publishing, 2004), p. 110.