Enoch Seeman
Enoch Seeman the Younger was born in Danzig, now Gdańsk, Poland, around 1694. His father, also Enoch was born around 1661, and the Seeman family were painters.
Having been brought to London from his home of Flanders by his father in 1704, the younger Seeman's painting career as we know it began with a group portrait of the Bisset family in the style of the portraitist Godfrey Kneller, now held at Castle Forbes in Grampian, Scotland, and dated by an inscription 1708.
As a painter to the British royal court Seeman the Younger completed portraits of George I, in 1730, in the robes of his coronation and of George II some years later. The first of these pictures is held at the Middle Temple in London, England, and the second is at Windsor Castle in Berkshire, England, part of the royal collection.
In 1734, Seeman painted a portrait of Jane Pratt Taylor, daughter of Lord Chief Justice John Pratt. The portrait was sent to William Byrd, II of Westover, in Virginia, where it became part of the largest colonial portrait collection of the early eighteenth century. The painting is now part of the collection of the Virginia Historical Society.
The Yale University Art Gallery owns a portrait of Elihu Yale in 1717 by Seeman and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, US, owns his rendering of Sir James Dashwood, described by the Grove Dictionary of Art as 'Exceptionally lively'. Also by Seeman the younger, Abraham Tucker in 1739 at the National Portrait Gallery in London, England, and various copies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century portraits. The National Trust owns two examples of this set of his work – at Dunham Massey in Cheshire, England, a copy of a portrait of Lady Diana Cecil, and at Belton House in Lincolnshire, England, of Lady Cust and her Nine Children.
Despite royal commissions, Seeman the younger's work is thought of as less accomplished than that of the top flight of portraitists because of his lesser attention to detail in the facial features of different sitters. This is more apparent in male than in female subjects of Seeman's.
Seeman the younger died in 1744.
References
- Grove Dictionary of Art
- Meschutt, David, “William Byrd and His Portrait Collection”, MESDA (May 1988), pgs 18–47
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