Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 51.djvu/202

 from her Diaries and Letters,’ 1891 (Times, 2, 3 Nov. 1893).

[Times, 1 July 1886, p. 1, 3 July p. 7; Publishers' Circular, 15 June 1886, pp. 601–2, with portrait; World, November 1893.]

 SEEMAN or ZEEMAN, ENOCH (1694–1744), portrait-painter, was born in 1694 at Danzig in Germany, where his father was settled as a painter. It is possible that the famous German ‘virtuoso’ painter, Balthasar Denner, who received some of his early instruction in painting at Danzig, may have been a pupil of Seeman's father, for some of Seeman's early paintings were executed in imitation of Denner's manner. Among these were a portrait of himself at the age of nineteen, and an old woman's head in which the wrinkles, hair, fabric of clothes, are delineated in the minute manner which is seen in Denner's works. Seeman was brought by his father, when young, to London, and practised there as a portrait-painter with great success. He resided in St. Martin's Lane, and at first styled himself ‘Enoch Seeman, junior.’ He was a good portrait-painter, and his portraits of ladies were much admired. The conventionalities, however, of costume and posture have destroyed the value of his portraits. His portraits or portrait-groups were sometimes on a very large scale, such as the imposing picture of the Lapland giant, Gaianus, painted in 1734, now at Dalkeith Palace, and the family group of Sir John Cust [q. v.] at Belton House, Grantham. Seeman frequently painted his own portrait, in which he is seen in an animated attitude, with long flowing hair. One example is in the royal picture gallery at Dresden, and was engraved by J. G. Schmidt. Another, with his daughter in boy's clothes, was at Strawberry Hill. A portrait by him of Sir Isaac Newton, formerly in the possession of Thomas Hollis, F.S.A., was engraved in mezzotint by J. MacArdell. Seeman also painted George II, Queen Caroline (a portrait of whom by him is in the National Portrait Gallery), and other members of the royal family. He died suddenly in 1744. His son, Paul Seeman, painted portraits and still life, and his three brothers were all painters and ingenious artists, one of whom, Isaac Seeman, died in London on 4 April 1751. The name is sometimes, but erroneously, spelt Zeeman.

[Vertue's Diaries (Brit. Mus. Addit. MSS. 23074, 23076, &c.); Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting; Redgrave's Dict. of Artists.]

 SEEMANN, BERTHOLD CARL (1825–1871), botanist and traveller, born at Hanover on 28 Feb. 1825, was educated at the Lyceum there, then under Grotefend, the celebrated cuneiform scholar, from whose son he received his first botanical teaching. Seemann's first botanical paper, ‘Descriptiones Plantarum Novarum vel minus cognitarum,’ published in ‘Flora’ in 1844, was written when he was seventeen. After graduating at Göttingen, he in 1844 came to Kew and worked under John Smith the curator (1798–1888), in order to fit himself for travel as a botanical collector. In 1846 Sir William Jackson Hooker [q. v.] procured Seemann's appointment as naturalist to H.M.S. Herald, under Captain H. Kellett, C.B., then engaged on a hydrographical survey of the Pacific. Seemann started at once for Panama. Finding that the Herald had not returned from Vancouver, he explored the Isthmus, finding many new plants, besides hieroglyphics at Veraguas, which he described in a paper read before the Archæological Institute. He joined the Herald in January 1847, and remained with her till June 1851. Almost all the west coast of America was explored, and three cruises were made into Arctic seas. In Peru and Ecuador Seemann travelled with Mr. (afterwards Captain) Bedford Clapperton Trevelyan Pim [q. v.] from Payta through the deserts and over the Andes to Guayaquil; and in Mexico he went from Mazatlan over the Sierra Madre to Durango and Chihuahua, narrowly escaping the Comanche and Apache Indians. In 1848 the Herald was ordered to Behring Strait to search for Franklin, first in company with the Plover and afterwards with the Enterprise and the Investigator. Herald Island was discovered, and a higher latitude than any previously attained in that region was reached, while Seemann collected many plants and anthropological specimens relating to the Esquimaux, visited Kamtchatka and the Sandwich Islands several times, and finally came home by Hongkong, Singapore, the Cape, St. Helena, and Ascension. ‘The Botany of the Voyage,’ which was published between 1852 and 1857, with analyses by J. D. (now Sir Joseph) Hooker and one hundred plates by W. H. Fitch, comprises the floras of Panama, north-west Mexico, West Esquimauxland, and Hongkong. Seemann's ‘Narrative of the Voyage,’ published in two volumes in English in 1853, was translated into German in 1858. Its author was made Ph.D. of Göttingen, and was elected a member of the Imperial Academy Naturæ Curiosorum (now the Leopoldine Academy) under the title of Bonpland. In the same year he began, in conjunction with a brother, who died in 1868, to edit a German journal of botany under