SIDNEY HERBERT SIME (1867 - 1941)

 
 
' THE SCENE SHIFTER '
 
 
Watercolour heightened with white
26 x 20 cm
 
 
PROVENANCE
Anonymous sale, Christie's, South Kensington, 3 June 2008, lot 139;
With Campbell Wilson Fine Art
 
 
 
 
 
 
Sidney Sime was born to a family of humble means in Manchester. When still a young man, he was sent to work in the mining pits of Yorkshire, where he was subject to terrible conditions and even came close to losing his life in at least one accident. Fortunately for us, he left this wretched situation and worked for a time in a linen shop, then a barber's and then as an independent sign writer and painter. His facility at the latter led to his enrolling at the Liverpool School of Art, where he won plaudits and official awards which would set him firmly on a path to his later professional success. 
 
 
Sime moved to London and swiftly attracted the attention of the artist-cum-writer Jerome K. Jerome, then editor of popular The Idler, a literary magazine whose contributors included Kipling and Mark Twain. Further commissions came in from The Illustrated London News, Pall Mall, The Butterfly, Pick-me-Up and Punch over the course of the 1890s and early 1900s, by which time he had become one of Britain's best-established illustrators. Indeed, such was his success that in 1899 he purchased the The Idler and became its editor himself for a brief time. 
 
 
 
Following his marriage in 1898 to the miniaturist Mary Pickett, Sime relocated to Aberfoyle in Scotland.. Sime had also purchased a studio in Chelsea, from which he could continue his visit to his clubs and the theatres, which provided him with further work as a set designer. In 1904, Sime and his wife moved to Surrey to be closer to London, buying an old coaching inn in Worplesdon. Here he furnished the house in the fashionable Aesthetic style, filling its bookcases with the poems of Poe and the novels of de Quincey, and decorating it with works by his friend Augustus John and prints by Goya, Hokusai and Hiroshige. He would often visit the nearby inn in Worplesdon to sketch caricatures of local tradesmen from a quiet corner. 
 
 
 
A key figure in Sime's life and career approached him in 1904: the Irish peer Lord Dunsany, a writer himself, who commissioned Sime to illustrate for him. He remarked that he had 'never seen a black and white artist with a more stupendous imagination'. Another eminent eccentric from the peerage, Lord Howard de Walden, became his second great patron, and it was for the two of them that he produced some of his finest illustrative work. Sime also joined de Walden and Dunsany's theatrical projects, designing sets and backdrops for their hugely fashionable productions. 
 
 
 
In later life, Sime began to produce more works in oils and colours, partly so that he could exhibit them in commercial galleries to continue earning his living and partly as his fascination with Apocalyptic literature prompted him to create ever-more imaginative pieces. Two exhibitions, in 1924 and 1927, were critically well-received, but after these Sime became increasingly reclusive. The poet Desmond Coke noted in his 1928 Confessions of an Incurable Collector that 'Sime...has something of the real spark in him...above all, his CONTEMPT FOR FAME'. In the final act of Sime's life he effectively painted for himself and only did so when he wished to. Upon his death, his widow Mary bequeathed all of her husband's pictures to the trustees of Worplesdon Memorial Hall, which later became the Sidney Sime Gallery and still operates to this day. 
 
 
Lord Dunsany eulogised Sime shortly after his death thusly:
 
"We have lost .....a genius whose stupendous imagination has passed across our time little more noticed by most people than the shadow of a bird passing over a lawn would be noticed by most of a tennis party...
 
...And now that vast imagination has left us, having enriched our age with dreams that we have not entirely dreamed." [1]