
Peter Rees
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The present lot was painted during Thomas Seddon's first visit to Egypt. Arriving in December 1853, he was later joined by William Holman Hunt, the two artists setting up camp near the Pyramids in Cairo, and working together until May 1854, when they departed for Jerusalem.
The influence of the Pre-Raphaelite style, and especially Hunt's Middle-Eastern works, is evident here. Seddon's association with the Pre-Raphaelite movement started in the late 1840s, when he worked with Ford Madox Brown.
Seddon only exhibited a handful of works during his short career, including three Egyptian subjects, painted during his second visit to Cairo in 1856, during which the artist contracted dysentery and died.
Following his death, an exhibition of his work was held at the Society of Arts in 1857, at which John Ruskin noted how Seddon's Egyptian and Middle-Eastern works were 'the first landscapes uniting perfect artistic skill with topographical accuracy; being directed, with stern self-restraint, to no other purpose than that of giving to persons who cannot travel trustworthy knowledge of the scenes which ought to be most interesting to them'.1
1Hugh Chisholm, 'Thomas Seddon', Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 24, p. 577.