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Robert Seymour

Somerset, England, 1798 - 1836

Biographyhttp://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/nr90001377
Seymour, Robert (1798–1836), illustrator and caricaturist, was born in Somerset, the second son of Henry Seymour and his wife, Elizabeth, née Bishop (d. 1827). The family moved to London, where Henry Seymour worked as a cabinet-maker for a Mr Seddon. He died during a return visit to Somerset, leaving his wife, two sons, and a daughter in very poor circumstances. Robert was apprenticed in London to a Mr Vaughan as a pattern-drawer in Duke Street, Smithfield, but his ambition was to be a professional painter. He was a frequent visitor to the house of an uncle, Thomas Holmes, in Hoxton, where he met the painter Joseph Severn. In 1822 Seymour's painting depicting a scene taken from Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered with over 100 figures was exhibited at the Royal Academy. Another was rejected, and although Seymour continued to paint in oils, he turned to illustration for his livelihood.

In the next five years Seymour produced designs for a wide range of subjects including poetry, melodramas, children's stories, and topographical and scientific works. Among the books which can be identified are William Robinson's The History of Enfield (2 vols., 1823); Public Characters of All Nations (3 vols., 1823); Le diable Boiteux (1824); and Mary Sherwood's My Uncle Timothy (1825). A steady supply of work enabled him to live comfortably with sufficient time to enjoy his library, fishing and shooting expeditions, and visits to a gymnasium with Lacey the publisher and George Cruikshank.

In 1827 Seymour's mother died, and he married his cousin Jane Holmes, who later gave birth to a son, Robert, and a daughter, Jane. The same year the publishers Knight and Lacey became bankrupt, owing Seymour a considerable amount of money. Without their regular employment, he now had the opportunity to experiment with the etching process, and was fortunate to have his work accepted by the printseller Thomas McLean. He began producing caricatures in the style of George Cruikshank, signed with the pseudonym Shortshanks, which was quickly discarded when Cruikshank objected to it. Seymour's first etched book illustrations appeared the same year in Vagaries in Quest of the Wild and Wonderful by Piers Shafton Grafton (Mr Becke), and Herbert Trevelyan's Snatches from Oblivion. These were rather weak efforts, but his abilities developed rapidly, and by the time that works such as The March of Intellect (1829) and The Heiress (1830) were published, the humorous scenes are well observed and executed with much greater assurance.

Having mastered the art of etching, Seymour turned to lithography, and by 1830 he was using the process for separate prints and book illustrations. In the same year he was invited by Thomas McLean to take over production of the Looking Glass, a caricature magazine that had been started in 1830, etched throughout by William Heath. Seymour provided four large lithographed sheets of illustrations every month until his death. Subjects are usually drawn several to a page, reflecting the social behaviour and political events of the time, with some fine full-page designs such as ‘W.A.R.: a Masque’, similar in style to John Doyle's caricatures. Two sketchbooks containing preparatory drawings for this publication, fine views of Windsor and Eton, figure studies, portraits, and other subjects are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Seymour, who by this time was in the first rank of British comic artists, continued to provide drawings for wood-engraved illustrations in books and periodicals, in spite of his misgivings about this medium. In 1831 he began work for a new magazine, Figaro in London, producing nearly 300 small drawings to accompany the text of Gilbert À Beckett, often, as was customary at the time, having to work up something humorous from a dull political topic suggested by the editor. The partnership lasted until 1834, when À Beckett suffered a heavy financial loss and refused to pay Seymour money owed to him. Despite Seymour's conciliatory attempt to resolve the matter, À Beckett attacked him publicly in the pages of Figaro in London. Seymour resigned, and returned to the paper only after Henry Mayhew had been appointed to replace the former editor.

Independently Seymour launched a new series of lithographs titled Sketches by Seymour between 1834 and 1836, devoted largely to the misadventures of cockney sportsmen. Although the designs are poor compared with his other work of this period, the prints were enormously popular, and were reissued several times during the following fifty years. Charles Baudelaire, the French poet, wrote, ‘As with the rest of the English, we find in Seymour a violence, a love of the excessive, and a simple, ultra-brutal and direct manner of stating his subject; when it comes to caricature, the English are extremists’ (Baudelaire, 188). Seymour is seen at his best in the twenty-four fine but relatively unknown etched plates made in 1835 to illustrate Thomas K. Hervey's The Book of Christmas and the twelve plates in The Squib Annual for 1836.

Another project was to have been a series of etchings by Seymour depicting the activities of a sporting club. After seeing the first four plates, Edward Chapman, of Chapman and Hall, agreed that the work should be issued in monthly parts with descriptive text, for which he suggested the young Charles Dickens. The first part of the new work, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club appeared, but before the second was completed Dickens had asked Seymour to provide a new plate for ‘The Stroller's Tale’. He did so, but was clearly unhappy about the way that his illustrations were now subordinate to the text. Before the second part had been completed, on 20 April 1836, Seymour shot himself with a fowling piece in the summer house to the rear of his home in Liverpool Road, Islington. His obituaries at the time suggest that the feud with À Beckett, the problems with Dickens over ‘The Stroller's Tale’, overwork, and illness were to blame, but in his last note he wrote, ‘Best and dearest of wives—for such you have been to me—blame, I charge you, no one.’ Contradictory claims and statements about the origin of Pickwick Papers were made long after Seymour's death, but Pickwickian figures can be seen in earlier works such as The Heiress and The Book of Christmas. In his introduction to Jane Seymour's book on the subject, the Dickens scholar F. G. Kitton states: ‘It is probably fair to surmise that had not her husband communicated to Edward Chapman his idea of publishing a series of Cockney Sporting Sketches, Pickwick would never have been written’ (J. Seymour, introduction).

Michael Heseltine
Sources

DNB · R. Seymour, Seymour's humorous sketches (1866) [with a biographical notice of Robert Seymour by Henry G. Bohn] · R. Seymour, Seymour's sketches (1867) [with an account of the artist and his works by John C. Hotten] · Thieme & Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon · G. Everitt, English caricaturists (1893) · M. Bryant and S. Heneage, Dictionary of British cartoonists and caricaturists, 1730–1980 (1994) · J. Seymour, An account of the origin of the ‘Pickwick papers’, ed. F. G. Kitton (1901) · W. Miller and E. H. Strange, A centenary bibliography of the ‘Pickwick papers’ (1936) · M. D. George, English political caricature: a study of opinion and propaganda, 2 vols. (1959), vol. 2 · Graves, RA exhibitors · C. Baudelaire, ‘Some foreign caricaturists’, The painter of modern life and other essays, ed. J. Mayne (1964)
Likenesses

R. Seymour, self-portrait, miniature on ivory, c.1827 · R. Seymour, self-portrait, lithograph
© Oxford University Press 2004–16
All rights reserved: see legal notice Oxford University Press

Michael Heseltine, ‘Seymour, Robert (1798–1836)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/25180, accessed 23 Oct 2017]

Robert Seymour (1798–1836): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/25180

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Last Updated8/7/24

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