Painter-Etcher

Sydney Long is Australia’s foremost landscape painter-etcher of the first half of the twentieth century.

During a visit to Cornwall in 1918 a colleague suggested to him that the graphic qualities and decorative feeling for line in his art meant it would be eminently suitable for etching.

That year he began to study printmaking part time at the Central School of Arts and Crafts under Frank Emanuel and, later, Malcolm Osborne and William P. Robins.

Lionel Lindsay was another spur to Long becoming a printmaker:

As Dorothy Ellsmore Paul observed in 1928: ‘His art is such an intimate reflection of himself, his delightful etching so much the result of his careful training as a painter, that to isolate Sydney Long the etcher would be to present a false picture of him’.