Listing Details
Sydney Lough Thomspon (1877-1973)
"...sometimes in one day 2 or 300 tunny boats would arrive and that meant between 1400 to 2000 fishermen from all parts of the coast living crowded on the wharfs and in the cafés. Men excited by having made a big catch or by not having caught anything."
Sydney Lough Thompson married Maude Ethel Coe at St Mary's Church, Irwell, Canterbury, on 28 March 1911 and shortly afterwards the couple left for Europe, intending to spend several years abroad. After a brief stop over in England the Thompsons arrived in Paris in September of that year.
There Thompson resumed his studies, this time under Lucien Simon in Paris, who it appears also had a seminal influence on the work on Frances Hodgkins. Thompson also attended the Académie Colarossi and took anatomy classes at the École Nationale Supérieure des beaux-arts. The Thompsons met several New Zealand artists including Frances Hodgkins, Owen Merton and Cora Wilding. The Parisian art scene provided Thompson with the opportunity to immerse himself in the art trends of the time. He was greatly influenced by the work of Paul Cézanne and the ever-increasing power of the Post-Impressionist movement.
Thompson relocated to Concarneau in 1913 with his wife, Ethel, and set up home at La Glacière, where the couple lived intermittently between 1913 and 1919. Thompson concentrated on creating small studies of the harbour, focussing on his technique and limiting his subject matter. These smaller studies illustrate Thompson's ability to fluently handle and register light and atmosphere effects by predominantly tonal means, akin to the plein-air sketches of British Impressionists.
Thompson was inextricably drawn to the harbour and townspeople of Concarneau. The lives of the fishermen and their boats would play out on his canvases. Though his use of bold brushstrokes and vivid colours, Thompson highlighted the link between the villagers and the harbour, the boats and the sea.
The fascination is clearly visible in the illustrated work, Drying Sails, Tunny Boats in Concarneau Harbour. Thompson's bold use of colour is used to dramatic effect: vivid green brushstrokes frame the hull of the boat in the immediate foreground - whilst its sails, picked out in yellow, dry in the afternoon sun. The masts of the tunny boats are framed against a bright blue sky. In this painting Thompson most certainly succeeded in his aim of creating a vision of an age-old unchanging landscape.
From Sydney Lough Thompson's Brittany. Jonathan Grant Galleries
It was Petrus van der Velden's painting which first aroused Sydney Thompson's interest in art, and in 1895 he registered as a student at the Canterbury College School of Art in Christchurch and began taking lessons at van der Velden's studio. Thompson's career spanned seven decades, and his painterly brushwork, use of bright colour and tonal relationships presented influenced a number of Canterbury artists.
Framing: Framed
Framed Dimensions: 450mm x 360mm H
