PROVENANCE
Private Collection, Christchurch

Sydney Lough Thompson was born in Oxford, North Canterbury in 1877 and studied at Canterbury College School of Art with Petrus van der Velden before departing for Europe in 1900 to further his studies.

His first journey abroad lasted five years and by the time of his return in 1905 he had achieved a reputation as both a landscape and figurative painter.

However, it was during the years between 1911 and his visit back to New Zealand in 1923, that he established his niche with paintings of life in the fishing village of Concarneau, Brittany. Throughout the years this region had attracted many artists, amongst them Frances Hodgkins, Paul Gauguin and Claude Monet and it became a major source of inspiration for Thompson's work. Over the next seventy years of his working life, he spent more than half that time living and painting in France.

Each time Thompson returned to New Zealand the public response to his work grew steadily more favourable as his particular form of impressionism resonated with the New Zealand public. Thompson's long career as a New Zealand artist in France ended in 1973 with his death at the age of ninety-six. He was laid to rest in his beloved Concarneau. In 1990 Christchurch Art Gallery held a major retrospective of his work entitled Home and Abroad. In France, regional recognition came in 1992 with a retrospective at the Musée de Pont-Aven, near Concarneau. Thompson.