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Seymour Stocker Kirkup (1788–1880) was an English painter and antiquarian, resident in Italy from 1816.
Kirkup became a leader of a literary circle in Florence and took up residence at the Casa Carovana, a palazzo near the Ponte Vecchio. He collected a library, of which a catalogue was printed in 1871, and maintained a copious correspondence. Walter Savage Landor, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Browning, Giovanni Aubrey Bezzi, Edward John Trelawny, Joseph Severn were his friends. As a keen student of Dante, he was a disciple of Gabriele Rossetti.
On Italian unification, Kirkup was created cavaliere of the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus; he subsequently affected the title "barone". He was short, and good-looking as a young man; in later life, eccentric in his dress and habits, and deaf. He was a believer in spiritualism, and a follower of the medium Daniel Dunglas Home.
Kirkup died at 4 Via Scali del Ponte Nuovo, Livorno, where he had lived since 1872, on 3 January 1880, and was buried on 5 January in the British cemetery there.
In 1840 Kirkup, Bezzi, and the American Henry Wilde, had permission to search for the portrait of Dante, painted according to tradition by Giotto, in the chapel of the Palazzo del Podestà in Florence. On 21 July 1840 they found it, and Kirkup made a drawing and tracing, before restoration work in 1841. The Arundel Society issued a reproduction from Kirkup's sketch, which was also engraved by P. Lasinio. Kirkup gave the tracing to Rossetti, who handed it on to his son Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and it was sold after the latter's death. Kirkup made some of the designs for Lord Vernon's edition of Dante's works.
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