Sydney Lough Thompson: Brittany
Past exhibition
Overview
Waiting in the Shade, Concarneau (SOLD)
Sydney Lough Thompson was born on 24 January 1877 in Oxford, Canterbury, New Zealand. His father, Charles Abel Thompson, was a man of some enterprise, who had come to New Zealand as a young man and had established a general store in Oxford, before purchasing a sheep farm about four miles from the town.
Sydney Lough attended school locally before beginning work on his father’s farm at the age of 13. He was always very fond of drawing as a child and his earliest memories of art were the annual exhibitions held by the Canterbury Society of Arts where he was introduced to the brooding landscapes of the Otira Gorge by Petrus Van der Velden.
Thompson was so moved by Van der Velden’s work that he resolved to join the Dutch painter’s drawing classes, which were held in the artist’s background studio in Durham Street, Christchurch. Thompson recalls his first reaction on seeing Van der Velden’s works; in the part of Canterbury we lived in, oil paintings were unknown and when I saw this group of Van’s work I was, as the saying goes, knocked right off my feet. Van der Velden was an immensely important formative influence, encouraging Thompson’s ambition to become an artist and developing his approach to painting. In 1895 Thompson registered as a student at the Canterbury College School of Art in Christchurch. He was counted as one of the most promising students at the School of Art, and in 1896 gained three of the six free studentships. In 1899 he won a silver medal for his still-life painting, The Saddle, in the national competition of the British Department of Science and Art, the highest award gained by an art student in New Zealand.
