More about Sidney H. Sime Memorial Gallery

Sidney Herbert Sime was born in Manchester in 1867, the second of six children of Scottish parents. As soon as he was old enough, the young Sime went out to work, taking on a variety of jobs including that of a pit boy, when often during the day he would scratch drawings of demons and imps on the walls of the pit. The hours were long and spare time came only in the late evening, when he went out with paint box to find moonscapes. Having very little formal education, Sime took great pains to educate himself, so graduating to a post of sign writing, and at this point he was able to join the Liverpool School of Art, where he gained prizes and medals for his drawing.

His studies completed, Sime decided the best way for a young artist to start earning a profitable living was by illustrating for books and magazines. He contributed to many magazines, including Pall Mall, The Idler, Pick-me-up and The Illustrated London News, along with artists such as Lewis Baumer, Will Owen, Dudley Hardy, Maurice Greiffenhagen, Edgar Wilson and J. W. T. Manuel.

At one time, as a popular member of both the Langham Sketching Club and the Yorick Club in London, Sime interacted with musical friends Duncan Tovey and Joseph Holbrooke as well as the writer Lord Dunsany, for whose books he drew many illustrations. Sime’s interest in the theatre led him to produce many fine caricatures of artists from the stage. A number of these may be seen in the Sime Memorial Gallery at Worplesdon.

It was said of Sime by Frank Emanuel, ‘Mr Sime is as eloquent and vivacious in his speech as with his pencil, and modest though he be, he is markedly a man of great individuality and deep thought. A vast forehead dominates a face indicative of strength, while a certain appearance of grimness is frequently dispelled by a humorous twinkle of the eye and the most genial of smiles. In short he looks very much the author of his drawings, in equal part an irresistible humorist, an original thinker and a truly inventive artist.’

Although Sime earned his living as an ‘illustrator’, he still cherished ambitions of becoming a painter and so gained membership of the Royal Society of British Artists in 1896.

In 1898 Sime’s deceased solicitor uncle left him comfortably well off with a residence in Perthshire. It was to this house that Sime brought his artist bride Mary Susan Pickett and here in Scotland he took the opportunity to develop his talent as a painter. The Worplesdon gallery houses several of his Scottish landscapes.

Sime also took a studio in Kings Road, Chelsea, and while enjoying the congenial stimulus of friends in London decided to sell his Scottish home and buy a house in Worplesdon (its location being more accessible to London) next to his friend Duncan Tovey. Here he became a regular visitor to the local inn, often staying until closing time, where he would sit and draw caricatures of local working men and tradesmen. Today many are on view at Worplesdon.

It is said that Sime was an avid reader with preferences for Poe, Heine, De Quincey and Meredith, and would return to his studio after country walks to read and paint long into the night. Holbrooke Jackson wrote of Sime, ‘He is an art product of the nineties, along with Aubrey Beardsley, Charles Condor, Charles Ricketts and Laurence Housman.’ In 1922 Haldane Macfall writes, ‘Sime ranges free and unfettered and wide – his flight is limitless. He leaps into the immensities and is reckless of the eternities… Sime is eternally young with the reckless inquisition of youth.’

It was when invalided out of the army in 1918 that Sime’s passion for painting in oils was most prolific. He became obsessed with the visions of St John in the Book of Revelation and painted his own visions of the Apocalypse. Painting in oil and watercolour was very important to him, in fact more so than the reputation he gained as an illustrator, yet it was difficult to form an opinion of its merit, although the original version of Wild Beast Wood was rightly called his ‘masterpiece’. It was in 1924 that Sime staged a well-received exhibition at St George’s Gallery in London, and then another in 1927 with less acclaim.

Desmond Coke, visiting Sime at Worplesdon, writes in his Confessions of an Incurable Collector, ‘Sime, more than most alleged ‘geniuses’ whom I have met, has something of the real spark in him… his shattering conversation, his knowledge of the paints that he himself mixes with the loving care of an Old Master, in his rustic cottage/studio, his recondite knowledge of the Apocalypse, and above all his… contempt for fame.’

Hence, for the latter part of his life, Sime became something of a recluse, leaving the socially conscious artists with ‘significant form’ and relishing mysteriousness and obscurity, not wanting his art to be explicable. He died on May 22nd 1941 and his grave is marked by a rough block of granite in St Mary’s Churchyard, Worplesdon.

Mary Sime’s will in 1949 bequeathed all Sime’s pictures that remained in her possession for the creation of the Sidney H. Sime Memorial Gallery in Worplesdon, which was opened in 1956. Now 50 years on, the contents of the Gallery remain solely the work of Sidney Sime, his oil paintings, watercolours and black and white illustrations. For admirers of Sidney Sime’s work, a visit to the Gallery is highly recommended.

Anne Philps, Honorary Curator

Text source: PCF / Sidney H. Sime Memorial Gallery

This description was originally written for a catalogue.