The gondoliers

In relation to his obvious prowess as a printmaker, there is surprisingly and disappointingly little information that is readily accessible about Sydney Litten (1887-1934). Even the date of his death is often wrongly given as 1949 because of the demise that year of a near namesake, Sidney Litton.

Litten studied art at St Martin's School of Art and etching at the Royal College of Art under Frank Short and became Senior Master at St Martin's, exhibiting at the Royal Academy and the New English Art Club. He did the majority of his work in Spain and Italy. Fifty-one of his prints are recorded in the annual Fine Prints of the Year between 1926 and 1935. Like Whistler and McBey he did his etchings in series such as his Thames images and two Venice Sets of four prints each, done in 1928. Venice was the subject for fifteen etchings, exhibited until 1935, the year after his death in London. Sydney Litten was the father of the artist Maurice Sydney Litten (1919-1979).

The portrait painter and printmaker Andrew Freeth wrote of the older Litten: "To many friends he seemed a gentle faun. His work was sustained on two levels; one - traditional, sensitive, topographical realism, the other - imaginative and poetic...All his work is deeply sincere, soundly drawn and inspired by a genuine passion for nature and an awareness of the mystery which lies behind the usual world."

Freeth has recently been echoed by St John's College Annapolis student Holly Huey, who writes of Litten's Venetian prints in the Mitchell Gallery:

"There’s something  ethereal about Sydney Litten’s work. The articulation of the buildings are not quite defined, the water only seen by the amorphous reflections of the gondolas and structures, the people shadowy images melding into the print itself.

Is there a fog, a mist over enveloping the viewer’s gaze? Have I slipped into a Midsummer’s night dream?

Unlike other printers, Litten does not use line to separate space from space. His lines do not delineate a building or outline a figure. Dark does not mean line, and light does not mean space. Rather his lines are the very space by which his forms come to be. The gondolas are not “shaded” in with lines between an outline; the lines are the form of the gondola.

In this way, Litten does not simply articulate space his print, but creates space. The dark is just as much a part of the print as is the light. His lines, forms, merge a balance of the two tones. If too dark the forms become distinctly separate from his created space. If too light, the structures are not forms at all. The lines provide both articulation and form, an emergence from space without entirely leaving the material from which the form was created.

Litten’s buildings appear to float upon the water as lightly as the gondolas glide across the canals. There’s something magical about this. A floating city is indeed a romantic notion. Reality and dream meld together as easily as the structures in the distance in meld into the background. 

Am I dreaming? Do I want to wake up?"

Litten's Venice bears comparison with the far better known equivalents by James Whistler and, more recently, James McBey. They are, as Ms Huey sensitively implies, lyrical fusions of etching and drypoint, light, air and reflection, enhanced by the coloured paper (in this instance pale blue). In The gondoliers there is a subtly modernist seriality in the two echoing motifs of gondolas and their commanders.

See:

The Annex Galleries, 'Sidney Mackenzie Litten Biography', https://www.annexgalleries.com/artists/biography/1413/Litten/Sidney

The Mitchell Gallery, 'Tag: Sydney [sic] Litten', https://themitchellgallery.wordpress.com/tag/sydney-litten/

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art   September 2018