Sydney Lee (engraver)

Sydney Lee RA (27 August 1866 – 31 October 1949) was a British wood engraver, active at the beginning of the twentieth century.

He spent time in his father's mills, then enrolled at the Manchester School of Art, studying sculpture and relief modelling, and became interested in printmaking using metal and wood.

In an election for the Society's president in December 1938 he was defeated by a narrow majority of two votes in favour of the architect Edwin Lutyens.

In 2013 an exhibition, From the Shadows: The Prints of Sydney Lee RA, was held in London at the Royal Academy of Arts from 27 February to 26 May.

Lee was a versatile artist in a wide range of media, oils, wood engraving and the woodcut, as well as etching, drypoint, aquatint, mezzotint and lithography.

[4] His wood engravings,[5] largely traditional in approach, featured scenes and buildings, and appeared regularly in the Studio Magazine.

Salaman states: "But while Mr. Lee is loyal to the hard box-wood and graver for his black-and-white expression upon the block, he has yielded for colour to the lure of the softer woods—the cherry and the pear—and, in the manner of the Japanese, has taken knife in hand and cut designs of a broad simplicity appropriate to the colour-print.