His father had come to New Zealand as a young man and ran a general store in Oxford before becoming a sheep farmer.
On 28 March 1911, Thompson married Maude Ethel Coe at St Mary's Church in Irwell, Canterbury,[3] and shortly afterwards, went abroad again to London and France.
In November 1936, he was commissioned by the Lyttelton Harbour Board to produce a painting of the port to be presented to the Robert McDougall Art Gallery.
Thompson dedicated the second painting to Walter Kenneth McAlpine, the recently deceased chairman of the board, when he presented the gift in July 1937.
[2] Sydney Thompson was trained under the realism school prevalent in Western Europe at the latter part of the nineteenth century.