The Paget Style

Sidney Paget undertook the job of illustrating Arther Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories for The Strand Magazine in 1891. However, his hiring was a mistake. The editors had actually offered the job to his brother, Walter, another fine illustrator whose drawings eventually adorned the works of Shakespeare, Walter Scott, H. Rider Haggard, Daniel Defoe, and others. It proved to be a most fortuitous mistake for the Sydney Paget illustrations of the Holmes stories proved to be superbly unequaled.

Wrote James Montgomery in 1954, “It would be impossible to overestimate the influence that Paget exerted…on his interpretation of Holmes, Watson, and the golden time ‘where it is always 1895.’ From that day to this, no characterization, no other mood has been accepted by English readers, and when his untimely death in 1908 necessarily shifted his mantle to other shoulders, the artists who followed him — several of greater skill and reputation — were compelled to subordinate themselves to the Paget style in all essential particulars. It has been truly said that what Phiz did for Pickwick, Paget did for Sherlock Holmes.”

Here are examples of both men’s work. The first two are Walter Paget illustrations from, respectively, Treasure Island and King Solomon’s Mines. And the other two, of course, are Sidney Paget’s work for the Sherlock Holmes stories.