English painter and furniture designer, part of a family of artists and craftsmen, active 18th-early 20th century. He was the great-grandchild of George Seddon I (c. 1727-1801), grandchild of Thomas Seddon I (1761-1804), and child of Thomas Seddon II (1792-1864), all furniture makers. Thomas Seddon III was a painter of Orientalist scenes. Son of a highly successful cabinetmaker, Thomas Seddon began his artistic studies as an ornamental artist. He followed this course well into his career, studying decorative art in Paris for a year and winning a prize for design in 1848. His first real paintings of the landscape began in 1849 with a trip to Wales. Trips to Barbizon and to Brittany followed in 1850 and 1853. Seddon made his first trips to the Middle East in 1853 and 1854. The first voyage brought the artist into contact with Sir Richard Burton and completed a painting of an Arab Sheik in full costume for him. A second, longer voyage followed in 1854, this time in the company of William Holman Hunt. Seddon was sympathetic to the Pre-Raphaelite principle of a new truth and honesty in the depiction of nature, and Holman Hunt, the greatest Pre-Raphaelite theorist and only painter to adhere to its methods throughout his career, found in Seddon a companion who shared his desire for an art that depicted nature without artifice and reflected distinctively English values. Upon leaving Egypt, Seddon and Hunt continued to the Holy Land, where Seddon painted Jerusalem and the Valley Jehoshaphat from the Hill of Evil Counsel, now housed at the Tate Collection in London. An exacting draftsman, Seddon became a founder and professor of the North London School of Drawing. Seddon caught dysentery during this third trip to the East, and died in Cairo in 1856. //