Thomas Sidney, Fishing Boats on the Venetian Lagoon

Thomas Sidney was a prolific British watercolourist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He painted the coasts of Cornwall, Devon, Sussex and Yorkshire, with Robin Hood’s Bay a favourite subject, and made a number of Venetian views. He seems never to have exhibited, and appears in Jeremy Wood’s dictionary of neglected artists, Hidden Talents.

A group of fishing boats lie on the still lagoon under a pale evening sky. They are bragozzi, the broad-sailed working boats of Chioggia and Venice, whose sails carried painted emblems. These bear a cross, a number and, on the nearest boat, a rising sun. A mooring post stands in the water to the right, and gulls wheel over the low line of the shore.

Watercolour heightened with white. Signed lower left ‘Thos Sidney’ on a patch of white bodycolour. In a gilt mount within a gilt frame with an inner rope-twist moulding.