As a sixteen-year-old at Bedford School, studying ‘O’ level art under the energetic Head of Art, Ron Dalzell, I felt some relief as we moved from what I considered the rather stuffy work of the of the 17th and 18th and found ourselves, metaphorically speaking, in the 19th Centuy. To me the Pre-Raphaelites possessed an energy and relevance that was absent in the work of the Old Masters whose work was considered so essential if we were to understand what art was all about.
Earlier this year, nearly sixty years after sitting (and passing!) my Art ‘O’ Level, I found myself heading for the Rossetti Exhibition at the Tate Gallery. Sadly, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s work, viewed ‘en masse’, struck me as possessing less depth than it had done when I was an impressionable teenager all those years ago. Notwithstanding that, I was reminded that it has a superficial glamour that is undeniably decorative, and perhaps it is this quality that attracted me to the work of the Pre-Raphaelites in the first place, (and may well explain why I went on to make a career in the ‘Decorative’ and not the ‘Fine’ Arts).
Certainly, the highlight of the exhibition, as far as I was concerned, was not a picture, or even one of several romantic poems by Dante’s sister,
Christina, but an extraordinary piece of furniture known as ‘King Rene’s Honeymoon Cabinet’. Normally housed in the V and A where it sits in front of a wall appropriately hung with William Morris’s ‘Fruit’ wallpaper, it was instead in pride of place at the very centre of the exhibition.
I am familiar with this cabinet and knew that it had been designed by John Pollard Seddon (1827-1906), an important and highly regarded Neo-Gothic Victorian architect and admirer of John Ruskin. I remembered that it had been constructed for his own use at his father’s cabinet-making workshop, incorporating panels designed by William Morris and painted by Edward Burne-Jones, Rossetti himself and Ford Maddox Brown, who had suggested the overall theme which depicts scenes from the life of the Medieval King René of Anjou, a notable patron of the arts. As such it can truly be said to form a three-dimensional representation of the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and its followers. As testimony to its importance, it had been exhibited at the influential 1862 International Exhibition, staged by proponents of the Arts and Crafts Movement as an inspired counterblast to the Great Exhibition which had taken place eleven years previously and had come to represent much that was wrong with contemporary British design and manufacture.
I also knew that Seddon had an elder brother, the artist Thomas Seddon, a friend and travelling companion of Holman Hunt, (1827- 1910) and that it was through him, as well as William Morris, that he had gained privileged access to the Brotherhood and its followers. Beyond this, I knew little about him!
When I came to do some light research into his life and background, I made a discovery that took my breath away – namely that John Pollard Seddon had been educated at Bedford School! Seeking reassurance that he was indeed the case and not having heard it mentioned before, I made a quick search of the amazing on-line School archives. This took me firstly to Volume IV (no.98) of the Ousel, published on October 17th 1891, which reveals that he donated the princely sum of 5 shillings (about £35 today) to the construction of the School’s new fives courts, but, secondly, and more importantly, to Volume X, (no. 288), published on 15th February 1906, (just two weeks after Seddon’s death) where at the head of page one is a brief but moving paragraph headed ‘In Memoriam’. With the sort of modesty so typically shown by the School in respect of its Old Boys’ achievements, readers are advised merely that he had been a Fellow of the Royal Institution of British Architects and had entered the School in February 1841, leaving nearly three years later in December 1843. There is absolutely no reference to his furniture designs, his association with the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood or the fact that he designed over two thousand institutional, ecclesiastical and domestic buildings, (not all of which were built of course!) or that his drawings of these buildings had been gifted by his daughter to the V and A Museum only ten years previously. (Perhaps if he had donated more to the Fives Court Appeal he would have received a more fulsome tribute!)
I am now left with the literary equivalent of itchy feet. Whilst several reference sources mention the fact that he was educated at Bedford Grammar School (as the School was known at the time), I am none the wiser as to why this should be the case. We know that Mr. Seddon Snr., who lived in London, was the wealthy scion of a highly successful furniture manufacturing dynasty. At the time the School was a small establishment although under the 45-year headmastership of Dr Brereton, who was to retire in 1855, pupil numbers had grown from just half a dozen to nearly two hundred. Was it publicity associated with rapid expansion that brought the School to his attention and made him choose it for his son? Or could it have been the emphasis placed on drawing at Bedford School at the time, culminating in the appointment of successful artist Bradford Rudge as Head of Art in 1840, that persuaded him to make this decision. Doubtless John had shown talent in this respect and certainly his brother Thomas was beginning to make a name for himself by 1841. (Curiously Thomas was educated at Stanmore in a school run on progressive Pestalozzian lines by the Rev. Joseph Barron at Stanmore. Readers of this article who are teachers at Bedford School, will know about Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, 1746-1827, the Swiss social reformer who is sometimes called the father of modern education. I confess that I have never heard of him but is gratifying to think that maybe Mr Seddon Senior saw the same qualities in Bedford School and Dr Brereton.)
I have much work to do if I am to find out more about Seddon and his family. Although he wrote a biography of his brother, poignantly published just two years after the latter’s death, and various books on architecture and travel, comparatively little seems to have been written about the great man himself. If any reader of this short summary of his life can tell me anything more about the life of this hugely underrated Old Bedfordian, please contact me!
David Fletcher (58-69) 2nd November 2023