Edward Seago: The Capricorn

"August Afternoon, Champs Elysées" by Edward Seago

"Apart from occasional trips to London and the visits to Sandringham, the only time Edward Seago spent any time away from home was to live on his boat. At sea he became more ambitious and exchanged 'Endeavour' for a younger, more seaworthy craft, 'Capricorn,' a thirty-ton auxiliary ketch, which he equipped as his ideal floating studio.

Even her name fired his romantic imagination. It had been chosen because she was registered in the month of December and Seago learnt with satisfaction that those born under the symbol of the goat were headstrong and brave of heart. Further investigation revealed that the symbol should, in fact, be a sea-goat - half goat, half fish. He interpreted it in a pair of frolicsome creatures with long scaly tails which he had cast in brass, covered in gold leaf and fixed to either side of the bow of his boat's blue-green hull. A red pennant held by another golden capricorn streamed from the top of the main mast.  Gold flashed from her symbols, the name on her hull, her lifebelts and from an extravagant thin gold line just above the rubbing rail. 

In his refitted floating studio he crossed the Channel to Dieppe for the first of a series of memorable cruises to Paris. He had never seen the port, but he felt he knew it well from the pictures of Bonington, Fancia and Whistler. Its character had been changed by modern features like lamp posts, telegraph poles and traffic, and he queried whether the older artists would have recognized it. But, for his own part, he often found good painting material in the evidence of modern times. In Dieppe, Seago set up his easel near the port to sketch the ragged skyline of leaning roofs and chimney stacks and old grey-washed houses.

Capricorn cruised up the Seine in the August sunshine and the painter made notes in his sketchbook of the passing scenes. Had he stopped long enough to set up his easel and make more permanent records he knew he would have been faced with the difficulty he invariably encountered in strange places where he saw so much to paint that he did not know where to begin.

'At first, all the more obvious compositions catch the eye,' he wrote in his last book 'With Capricorn to Paris,' after they had passed a chateau he longed to paint. 'If I had painted the chateau it would have been the whole chateau as I had first seen it - pink and grey against the dark trees and the cool, green pattern of the shadow-streaked pasture. Then I expect the light would change and I should want to paint it again. Only after I had worked there several days would my eye become more selective. I should find bits of the chateau - a corner of a terrace and some stone steps; perhaps only one doorway - and then I should leave the chateau and find endless subjects under the trees and along the smooth grass of the river bank where anglers sat by the hour.'" 

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Edward Seago: The Other Side of the Canvas" by Jean Goodman.)