Sydney Mary Thompson was born in Whitehouse, County Antrim. She studied art from 1870 at the Belfast Government School of Art. She won many prizes. She was a member of the Belfast Ramblers' Sketching Club and the Belfast Art Society. She married Randolph Christen, an art instructor from Switzerland, in 1900, and they left to live in Scotland. In 1921 she became a patron of the Belfast Art Society. She wrote a tribute to her husband, Randolph Christen: The Story of an Artist's Life, which was published in 1910. As well as art, her other consuming interest was geology, and she visited the volcanoes at Auvergne at the age of seventy-five.

Born:	1847
Died:	1923