| The images of Sherlock Holmes as drawn by Sidney
Paget have become as much a part of the canon's appeal as the text by Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle. In all Paget drew 537 sketches that appeared
with the Holmes stories in the Strand Magazine. Sidney
Paget was not the first choice of the editors who thought they were
commissioning his brother Walter a much better known artist who had illustrated
Treasure
Island and Robinson Crusoe. He did not always please Doyle who
remarked that Paget had made Holmes much handsomer than he intended.
The independence of Paget in interpreting the stories through his images often leads to a subtlesub text that may at times be with odds with traditional interpretation of the stories. The complex relationship between the Doyle text and the Paget sketches are the subject of the series of essays linked below. This page is under intermittent construction as time and imagination permits. For comments and questions  |
 |
