Drying Sails By Sydney Lough Thompson - Brittany

Oil on canvas, signed lower left. Dimensions without frame 38 x 46 cm, with frame 46 x 54 cm.

Sydney Lough Thompson (1877-1973) was born in Oxford, New Zealand and without Pétrus Van der Velden, a German painter who ended his career in New Zealand, the young Thompson would have become a sheep farmer like his father. In 1895, encouraged by the latter, he enrolled as a student at the Canterbury College School of Art in Christchurch. This emancipation allowed Thompson to leave for London in 1900 then for Paris in 1901 and finally to discover Concarneau in 1902, a city for which he had a real crush. Back in his country, he became a teacher at his old art school from 1906 to 1910. Then Thompson married Maude Ethel Coe on March 23, 1911, and decided to take her to his second adopted city: Concarneau. It seems that Mrs. Thompson liked the city since they stayed there until 1923. It is there that their three children were born. He became one of the jewels of the "Concarneau group". Even if they returned home, the Thompsons would regularly return to Concarneau where Sydney died in 1973. Light and color are the nourishment of his art. His life as a painter was thus divided equally between his native country and France. Through the quality of his eye and the beautiful harmony of his palette, Thompson captured on the spot the people of sailors that he knew in the great era of sailing fishing, sardine boats and tuna boats. This painter is today highly sought after in his country.