Sydney returned to London late in 1918 to be informed by the RAF section of the Ministry of Information that he and his brother were to undertake a tour of the Middle East, recording episodes where the RAF had made a significant contribution to the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1916-18. The brothers travelled to Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, then from Port Said to Bombay, Karachi, Basra, Baghdad, Mosul, Kurdistan, Teheran, then back to the UK via Basra.
Richard focused on producing a series of impressive images of major cities sketched from the air. Sydney was more interested in evoking dramatic incidents from September 1918 when RAF aircraft on ground attack missions had transformed the retreat of Ottoman Turkish armies into an utter rout. He also produced more generalised yet extremely evocative images of flying in Middle Eastern skies, such as Flying Over the Desert at Sunset, Mesopotamia, 1919.
Sydney and Richard returned to London early in October 1919 to paint full-sized works from some of their sketches made in the field for inclusion in the huge “The Nation’s War Paintings” exhibition held at the Royal Academy in Burlington House from December 1919 to February 1920. Their contributions were singled out for critical approval, and they cemented their reputation as Britain’s leading “intrepid aerial artists” with a joint exhibition at London’s Goupil Gallery in March-April 1920. The show went on tour in the US and Canada to considerable acclaim, all of which helped Sydney to be appointed Master of Drawing at Oxford University’s prestigious Ruskin School of Art in January 1922.