Rating and value of paintings by Sydney Thompson

If you own a work by or based on the work of artist Sydney Lough Thompson and would like to know its value, our state-approved experts and auctioneers will guide you.

Our specialists will carry out a free appraisal of your work, and provide you with an accurate estimate of its value on the current market.

Then, should you wish to sell your work, we will direct you to the best possible arrangement to obtain the optimum price. 

Artist's rating and value

Thanks to their serene, luminous atmosphere, Sydney Lough Thompson's works meet with some success with collectors.

On the market, his various postimpressionist compositions are successful at auction. His works sell for between €200 and €35,200, a significant delta but one that says a lot about the value that can be attributed to these canvases.

Some of the artist's works, for example, have fetched unheard-of amounts, as evidenced by his painting L'enfant de l'artiste, Grasse,dating from 1930, which sold for €35,200 whereas it was estimated at between €22,500 and €33,800.

Order of value from the most basic to the most prestigious

The artist's work and style

Sydney Lough Thompson is part of the Post-Impressionist tradition, exploring light and color with great sensitivity. Trained in New Zealand before continuing his apprenticeship in Europe, he assimilated the influence of the Pont-Aven school, where he stayed on several occasions.

His vibrant palette and fluid brushstrokes reflect a marked interest in atmospheric effects and the spontaneity of gesture.

Working as much on the motif as in the intimacy of his studio, he favors scenes of Breton and New Zealand rural life, which he renders with chromatic intensity and an expressive touch.

His approach combines a rigorous structuring of forms and a free facture, enabling him to breathe a particular rhythm into his compositions.

He plays on light contrasts and color density to animate his landscapes and figures, creating an impression of movement and vitality.

His work, marked by a constant search for harmony between nature and humanity, asserts itself as a synthesis between impressionism and post-impressionism, rooted in modernity while remaining faithful to a sensitive observation of reality.

Sydney Lough Thompson's life

Sydney Lough Thompson was born in 1877 in New Zealand, where he trained at the Canterbury College School of Art before moving to Europe to further his apprenticeship.

Attracted by the artistic effervescence of the Old Continent, he spent long periods in France, particularly in Brittany, where he immersed himself in the atmosphere of Pont-Aven.

Fascinated by the light and rurality of the Breton landscape, he found it a major source of inspiration and returned there regularly. He also explored other regions, notably Normandy and the Loire Valley, always in search of new motifs and light effects.

In between trips, he returned to New Zealand, where he played an essential role in the evolution of local painting by exposing European trends and encouraging an opening towards modernist movements.

His commitment to teaching and his influence on the younger generation of New Zealand artists contributed to the transformation of the national artistic landscape. After settling permanently in France in the 1920s, he continued to exhibit on both sides of the globe, establishing an international career.

Recognized for his talent as a colorist and his ability to capture the soul of a landscape, he won several awards and saw his work acquired by public and private collections.

He died in 1973, leaving behind him a body of work imbued with light, color and a deep sensitivity to nature and rural life, a true link between Europe and his native country.

Focus on Marché en Bretagne, Syndney Thompson

Marché en Bretagne, among Sydney Lough Thompson's most emblematic works, reveals a conception of space concerned with balance and rigor, where light modulates forms with subtlety.

The painter, true to his approach, favors a palette dominated by muted tones, which he enhances with brighter touches, thus organizing the composition according to a skilfully mastered play of contrasts.

The scene, enlivened by the presence of peasant figures in traditional costumes, is in a naturalistic vein, without abandoning a stylization of volumes and a precise structuring of planes. 

At the time, artists who frequented Brittany oscillated between a synthetic transcription of the motif, inherited from the Pont-Aven School, and an approach more attentive to the materiality of the visible.

Thompson, on the other hand, favors a rigorous drawing, perceptible beneath the pictorial material, and a methodical plastic organization, reminiscent of the teaching of the masters of the European tradition.

 His fluid yet precise brushwork meticulously restores the texture of fabrics and the density of shadows, translating a desire for formal analysis that yields neither to gratuitous ornamentation nor to facile picturesqueness.

Far from an instantaneous capture of reality, Marché en Bretagne is part of a search in which the motif, far from being a simple subject, becomes a pretext for reflection on the balance of masses and the structuring of space.

From this perspective, the artist moves away from the subjective expression of gesture to embrace a tradition of rigorous construction, where the brushstroke itself, measured and controlled, participates in a desire for an ordered transcription of the visible.

Sydney Thompson's imprint on his period

Sydney Lough Thompson's imprint, in the context of the painting of his time, is distinguished by his ability to inscribe light and form within a rigorously structured framework.

At a time when stylistic evolutions were multiplying and Fauvism and Cubism were shaking up codes, Thompson anchored himself in a more classical tradition, while demonstrating an unprecedented mastery of light and shadow, capable of restoring the very essence of figures and landscapes.

His works, initially influenced by the 19th-century masters, are characterized by a sense of geometry and composition that reflects a constant search for volume and depth.

In his work, light becomes not only an element of the scene, but also a true actor in the composition. Thompson, faithful to the realist tradition, is interested in natural light, which he renders with great fidelity, while constructing space in a rational, sometimes even calculated manner.

This approach, far from the excesses and visual revolutions proposed by his contemporaries, allows him to leave his mark on the evolution of painting at the beginning of the 20th century, offering a stable anchor point in a pictorial universe where the externalization of emotion sometimes takes precedence over structure.

His influence, though more discreet, is to be found in this ability to capture the world in its most minute detail, away from currents of thought that seek above all rupture.

Sydney Thompson's artistic influences

Sydney Lough Thompson's artistic influences, throughout his career, are part of a figurative tradition that is nevertheless open to the major changes of his time.

Trained in the shadow of the great masters of the 19th century, notably at the Julian Academy, he initially drew his inspiration from realism and academicism, while drawing on the heritage of neoclassical painting, embodied by figures such as Ingres or David.

However, if his early works seem marked by this academic foundation, his vision is distinguished by a particularly precise eye for light and color, often likened to that of the Impressionists.

But where his contemporaries sought to capture the ephemeral and the immediate, Thompson lingers on the thickness and substance of the world.

Through his travels and his frequentation of the great European artistic centers, notably Paris, he encountered the beginnings of the modern movements, notably Fauvism and Cubism, from which he retained certain approaches to volume and light.

However, unlike his peers, he did not fully embrace these currents, preferring a more introspective approach, more inclined to a meticulous analysis of reality.

Thus, although his influences are varied, ranging from academic painting to Impressionism (including Pierre de Clausade, André Lagrange or Émile Boggio), his work seems to testify to a desire to reconcile the heritage of the past with the artistic experimentations of his time, without getting carried away by the emphatic stylistic ruptures of modernity.

His signature

Not all of Sydney Thompson's works are signed.

Although there are variations, here is a first example of his signature:  

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