Sydney Carline

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Sydney William Carline (14 August 1888 – 14 February 1929) was a British artist and teacher best known for painting aerial battles from World War I.

He was born in London to artist George Francis Carline and Annie Smith. His family were artists, including his brother Richard and sister Hilda. He studied at Repton School, the Slade School of Art (1907–1910), and in Paris.

In 1914 he began painting in Westmoreland, then joined the British Army and trained as a dispatch rider. He became a Royal Flying Corps pilot in 1916 and flew a Sopwith Camel on the Italian Front in late 1917. He was wounded over the Somme but recovered and continued painting war scenes.

During quieter moments he designed medals, including ones for the Battle of Jutland and for Next of Kin. In Italy he set up a studio in Vicenza and sketched combat scenes unofficially from 1918. His brother Richard helped him become an official war artist, and Sydney painted aerial battles on the Italian front from July to November 1918.

In January 1919 the brothers were sent to the Middle East by the Imperial War Museum as official RAF artists. They worked in places like Port Said, Ramleh, Jerusalem, and near Aleppo, making studies that led to paintings such as The Destruction of the Turkish Transport in the Gorge of the Wadi Fara. They returned to England for demobilisation in 1919.

The Imperial War Museum paid for a few finished paintings, and the brothers kept many sketches, which helped them stage a major show in 1920. Sydney had already shown at the Royal Academy before the war and continued to exhibit there until 1927.

In 1922 he was appointed Ruskin Master of Drawing at Oxford University, and in 1924 he joined the London Group. He also illustrated T. E. Lawrence’s Revolt in the Desert in 1926.

He married Gwendolen Harter in April 1928. He died of pneumonia in February 1929 after a visit to John Nash, at the age of 40. Memorial exhibitions followed, and his brother donated many of his works to the Imperial War Museum.

In 2017, an exhibition of his Italian-front paintings from 1917–18 was held in London at the Estorick Collection.