Early life Sydney Carline was born in London, the son of the artist
George Francis Carline and
Annie Smith (1862–1945). His brother,
Richard Carline and his sister
Hilda were also artists, as was his sister-in-law,
Nancy (née Higgins), and his brother-in-law,
Stanley Spencer. Sydney Carline was educated at
Repton School before he studied at the
Slade School of Art, between 1907 and 1910, and then in Paris. He was shot down and wounded, over the
Somme but survived and went on to pilot a
Sopwith Camel fighter on the
Italian Front in late 1917. During the first years of the war, during intervals in his war duties, Carline worked on the design of a medal commemorating the
Battle of Jutland and also a design for a 'Next of Kin' medal. During his time in Italy he established a studio in a museum building in
Vicenza and had, on an unofficial basis, been sketching combat scenes since February 1918. His brother, Richard, put him forward to be an official war artist and, in that capacity, he painted aerial battles on the Italian front from July to November 1918, usually sketching from a Sopwith Camel. '' In January 1919 both the Carline brothers were sent to the Middle East by the
Imperial War Museum, IWM, as official war artists for the
Royal Air Force, RAF, with a brief to depict aerial combat. The brothers arrived in
Port Said in January 1919 and then travelled to
Ramleh where they were based with
No. 1 Squadron of the
Australian Flying Corps. From there they moved to Jerusalem and began to travel around the region, often visiting historical and archaeological sites, alongside their military duties. Near
Aleppo they sketched the results of the RAF bombing raids on the Turkish airbase at
Rayak. At
Wadi Fara Sydney made a set of studies which eventually became the painting
The Destruction of the Turkish Transport in the Gorge of the Wadi Fara, Palestine, which depicted an RAF attack on a Turkish column in a steep gorge. After some time in
Beirut the brothers returned to flying duties, with Sydney making several flights over Wadi Fara and the Sea of Galilee. The brothers stayed in Cairo before moving to Baghdad where they remained until the middle of July when they went to Mosul from where the RAF were planning bombing raids against the
Kurdish uprising. Before that action they were recalled to England for demobilisation and arrived home in November 1919. In 1926 he created illustrations for
T. E. Lawrence's book
Revolt in the Desert. In April 1928, Carline married Gwendolen Harter. A number of memorial exhibitions were held in his memory and Richard Carline donated over a hundred of his works to the Imperial War Museum. During the first quarter of 2017 an exhibition of Carline's paintings from Italy in 1917-18 was held at the
Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art gallery in London. ==References==