P Office Tower from Wynard Street, 1916

Etching on paper
Bequest of Sir William Dixson, 1952
DL Pd 436

The publisher, art identity and advertising agency owner Sydney Ure Smith worked in Sydney from the 1910s to the 1940s. He is best known as a promoter of modern lifestyles and modernism, largely through his popular and hugely influential society magazine The Home. Ure Smith also published Art and Australia, the leading and most sophisticated art magazine in Australia at the time. These publications, and his natural sociability, placed him at the centre of Sydney’s art world, where he was known as a networker rather than an artist.

But Ure Smith was also a talented and committed artist. When he made this print of a Sydney street, which emphasised the city’s 19th-century Victorian heritage, he was learning the craft of printmaking. His teachers were fellow artists and leading Sydney printmakers Lionel Lindsay and Eirene Mort. Ure Smith believed that etching, the technique used in this print, was one of the most expressive. His choice of subject matter – the textures of the old city – was a popular one at the turn of 19th century, reflecting a sentimental desire to record the passing, indeed often destruction, of Sydney’s colonial buildings.