Sydney Long

Sydney Long was a small man of almost elfish appearance, with light blue eyes and brown hair and a very youthful smile. He was a sensitive gentle man, amiable and courteous, with a marked sense of humour.

Many years after Long’s death the artist Rubery Bennett remarked:

Isn’t it remarkable that we produce a man like Sid, [who] sees things with a different eye. He was a romanticist, he was a poet, he was a dreamer, and yet his work was never sissy. It was always robust, virile and alive. His trees – the sheoaks down by the water – he loved their shape … No one else was like him, not anyone.

‘Always he has brought something poetic to his translation of landscape that has rendered him a much loved artist craftsman’. (Dorothy Elsmore Paul, 1928)