Sid LONG

Australian 1871–1955
worked in England 1913–21, 1952–55

Born in Goulburn, New South Wales, Sid Long studied under A. J. Daplyn and Julian Ashton at the Art Society of New South Wales. His painting Tranquil waters, 1894 (in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales), completed while he was still a student, caused a sensation when first exhibited due to the placement of nude male figures in an outdoor setting. The press and parliament questioned its morality and the painting became the first of several subjects by Long to depict naked youths engaging with nature.

During the late 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century, Long developed his Symbolist interpretation of the Australian landscape that was largely derived from the English Aesthetic movement and European art nouveau. Works such as Farm landscape, 1905, with its subtle palette and gentle light, show eucalyptus trees poetically elongated, stylised and silhouetted to form a highly decorative frieze across the picture plane. These sensitive, decorative pastoral subjects represent the pinnacle of Long’s contribution to the history and development of Australian landscape painting, and reflect his personal interest in developing a visual vocabulary based on the imagination as well as reality:

The Australian artist will never be able to people the bush with nymphs or the rivers with naiades, unless he invents a special Australian brand, or forgets his native landscape … The drover, the shearer, the bullock driver, and even the bush ranger, to the utilitarian person, seems to be all that is needed as a keynote for Australian landscape, but to me the background calls for something that will better express the lonely and primitive feeling of this country. A feeling more suggestive of some melancholy pastoral to be rendered in music, and perhaps beyond the limits of painting, yet given the artist with imagination and a complete knowledge of his materials, he should produce work of the most imaginative kind from his surroundings.1

1 S. Long, Art and Architecture, Sydney, January 1905.

Geoffrey Smith