Born 4th October 1860

 

Born Sidney Edward Paget on October 4, in London. He was the fifth son of Robert Paget, vestry clerk of Clerkenwell, was educated at a City school, and early developed taste for drawing. On leaving school he studied from the antiques at the British Museum for two years, after which he went to Heatherley’s School of Art, in Norman Street, London, to study painting. Successful as an exhibitor (he showed two pictures at the Academy when he was only eighteen years old), he took a studio and began painting portraits and small pictures, at the same time illustrating books and papers, chiefly was subjects of Egypt and the Sudan. At twenty-one he entered the Royal Academy Schools for a term of six years, during which he carried off several important prizes.

Starting with A Scandal in Bohemia in the Strand Magazine for July, 1891, Paget produced a total of 357 drawings to illustrate The Adventures, The Memoirs, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and The Return of Sherlock Holmes, ending with The Adventure of the Second Stain in December 1904.

Ironically, Sidney Paget was commissioned in error; the Strand’s editors were under the mistaken impression that they were writing to his artist-brother, Walter Paget, who had made the drawings for Sir H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mine and She, but was perhaps best known for his illustrations for Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island.

Although brother ‘Wal’ Paget had lost the commission to illustrate the stories, he nonetheless made a major contribution to the picture many of us have of Holmes today: Walter Paget served as his brother Sidney’s model for the great detective. So, too, did Paget take as his model for Dr Watson another face familiar and convenient to him - that of his friend, Alfred Morris Butler, a well known architect of the time.