New Acquisition: Thomas Sisley Letters

The Grainger Museum has recently accepted a donation of three letters from Percy Grainger to Thomas Sisley dated 28 October 1903, 24 June 1923, and 17 December 1923.

Thomas Alexander Sisley (1846–1924) was a British writer, artist, and acting and elocution teacher. While his career in Britain had begun in the civil service, he migrated to Australia in 1886 where he became a well-known and respected public speaker and teacher.

Around 1892, a young Percy Grainger began taking lessons with Sisley across a range of artistic fields, including acting, elocution, drawing, and poetry, and it was through Sisley’s classes that he encountered formative texts like the Icelandic Saga of Grettir the Strong that would become a life-long inspiration. Although Grainger left Australia in 1895, he maintained a friendship with Sisley through occasional correspondence for the rest of Sisley’s life.

Thomas Sisley, signed photograph, 1924

The two long letters from 1923 in particular offer a window into a long-standing friendship, discussing topics that range from the mundanities of daily life to profound aesthetic philosophical theories of poetry, music, and art. Grainger compares knee injuries with Sisley, discusses their respective families, and praises Sisley’s acting student, the pioneering Chinese Australian actress Rose Quong. He describes the efforts he has made since his mother’s death to complete some of his largest works, laments the precarity of both men’s chosen career paths, and offers his thoughts on the influence of nature and the environment on artistic production:

It seems self-evident to me, but I can not explain why, that a love of art should tend to embrace the art of all times and places, and that the longer and more keenly we study art the more inevitably are we drawn away to the farthest as well as the nearest places of the earth.

These letters add to a small collection of related materials already held by the Grainger Museum, including watercolour paintings, articles, and poems by Sisley, and letters he and his daughter, Barbara, wrote to Grainger.

We thank Judith Ross-Smith OAM, the great-granddaughter of Thomas Sisley, for her generous donation of these letters, which are now available to researchers through the usual collections access processes.