Born 1874 - 1944

 

Born in a lumber camp, in 1874, near Marquette, Michigan, but a Now Yorker since boyhood. He studied at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League, where he later taught drawing. He took his first job, on the old Harper’s Weekly, for $15 a week ‘and glory’, but soon graduated into free-lance work, illustrating the stories of such writers as Richard Harding Davis, Rudyard Kipling, O. Henry, and Mark Twain. Known primarily as an illustrator, Steele worked in nearly every medium except oil, and design in colour. While vacationing at Monhegan, Maine, one summer, he developed an interest in cartography and a considerable skill as an etcher; he often asserted afterward that his ‘favourite drawing’ was a large-scale map of Monhegan which, with characteristic patience, he spent twenty-four years perfecting.
“I did not need to be told to make my Sherlock look like Gillette,” the artist wrote in “Sherlock Holmes in Pictures.” “The thing was inevitable. I kept him in mind and even copied or adapted parts of a few of the stage photographs. At that time I had never seen the play, and it was not until 1929 that Mr. Gillette actually became my model in the flesh...”
Steele’s original model for Sherlock Holmes was an Englishman named Robert King. Later, the artist, “fell back on that standby of the studios, Frank B Wilson,” and his two sons. Later still, Steele’s Sherlocks were drawn from “the fine frame and crag-like head” of a model named S. B. Doughty. Steele died in 1944.