Sidney Paget

Life

Sidney Paget was born into a large family, the fifth of nine children. His father, Robert, worked as a vestry clerk for two Clerkenwell churches, while his mother, Martha, taught music. In 1881, he began studying at the Royal Academy Schools, where he met Alfred Morris Butler, an architecture student who likely posed for Paget's drawings of Dr. John Watson. Over a twenty-six-year period ending in 1905, Paget showed eighteen works at Royal Academy exhibitions, half of them portraits.

His illustrations appeared in several major magazines, including the Strand, the Graphic, and the Illustrated London News, building his reputation on both sides of the Atlantic. He drew pictures for Arthur Morrison's Martin Hewitt stories and for Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales, boosting the fame of both series. Paget married Edith Hounsfield, a farmer's daughter, on June 1, 1893. The couple had six children: four daughters and two sons.

After several years of a painful chest condition, Paget died in Margate on January 28, 1908, at age forty-seven. His death certificate attributed the cause to a mediastinal tumour, a rare growth in the central chest that had caused exhaustion over three years. He was buried in East Finchley Cemetery. Two of his brothers, Henry Marriott and Walter Stanley, also worked as successful illustrators and portrait painters.

The Strand illustrations

Sidney Paget is most famous for shaping how the world sees Sherlock Holmes, thanks to his work on the original stories in The Strand Magazine. He was brought on to illustrate the first twelve Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which appeared monthly from July 1891 to June 1892. The following year, he handled the illustrations for The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. When Arthur Conan Doyle brought Holmes back for The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901–1902, he made a point of asking for Paget.

Paget then illustrated The Return of Sherlock Holmes in 1903–1904. Over his career, he produced drawings for one novel and 37 short stories. As the detective’s fame grew, Paget’s artwork got bigger and more detailed. Starting with “The Adventure of the Final Problem” in 1893, nearly every Holmes story in The Strand included at least one full-page illustration.

Paget was the one who gave Holmes his deerstalker hat and Inverness cape—items that never appear in the original text. These first showed up in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” in 1891, then again in “Silver Blaze” in 1893, and in a few Return of Sherlock Holmes drawings. (The curved calabash pipe came later, from stage actor William Gillette.) In total, Paget created about 356 published drawings for the series.

His version of Holmes became so influential that other artists felt they had to copy his style. A complete run of The Strand issues with Paget’s Holmes illustrations is one of the rarest and priciest collectibles in publishing. His original drawing “Holmes and Moriarty in Mortal Combat at the Edge of the Reichenbach Falls” sold at Sotheby’s in New York on 16 November 2004 for $220,800. A long-standing story claims the Strand hired Paget by mistake after he answered a letter meant for his younger brother Walter, but a 2019 study in the Baker Street Journal found no proof for this and plenty of evidence against it.