The Paget Illustrations: A Viewer's Guide

Sidney Paget illustrated thirty-seven Sherlock Holmes stories for The Strand Magazine between 1891 and 1908. He drew Holmes 356 times. He never met Conan Doyle in person until well into the run.

The image of Holmes most readers carry - the lean, hawk-nosed silhouette in the inverness cape - is Paget's. So is Watson's solid, moustached, faintly avuncular shape. Doyle's prose describes Holmes as an "almost an aesthete", "tall and lean", with a "thin, hawk-like nose" - but it was Paget who put a face to those words, and the face stuck.

The Paget that Doyle approved

Doyle was particular about Holmes's appearance. When The Strand commissioned the illustrations for the first short story - "A Scandal in Bohemia" - they intended to use Walter Paget, Sidney's better-known brother. The commission letter went to "Mr Paget" with no first name; Sidney accepted it on the assumption it was for him. By the time the mistake was caught, the first plates were drawn. Doyle saw them, approved them, and Sidney drew Holmes for the rest of his life.

The deerstalker hat - the visual shorthand for Holmes that has dominated every adaptation since - is not in Paget's illustrations. Paget drew Holmes in a soft cap, a top hat, or bareheaded. The deerstalker came from William Gillette's stage adaptation in 1899, and from there into film and television. Anyone selling you a Sherlock Holmes deerstalker silhouette is selling you a Gillette costume, not a Paget portrait.

The same is true of the curved Calabash pipe. Doyle's Holmes smokes a "long, cherry-wood pipe" or a "clay pipe" or, when feeling reflective, a briar. The Calabash entered the canon visually through Gillette and stayed there. Paget drew straight pipes.

The most important plates

A short list of the Paget illustrations every Holmes reader should know:

• The death of Sherlock Holmes - Memoirs, "The Final Problem". Holmes and Moriarty grappling at the brink of the Reichenbach falls. The plate is small, almost diagrammatic, and bears the entire emotional weight of Doyle's first attempt to kill the character. Readers wrote to The Strand in their thousands.
• Holmes contemplating in a chair - Adventures, "A Scandal in Bohemia". The introductory image; the silhouette that has anchored every Holmes adaptation since.
• The hound - The Hound of the Baskervilles. Drawn by Paget for the Strand serialisation of 1901-02. The hound itself is rarely shown directly; the menace is drawn from the moor's geometry.
• Holmes addressing Watson at the breakfast table - Adventures, "The Adventure of the Speckled Band". A small domestic image that captures the relationship's domestic ground better than any single line of Doyle's prose does.
• Mycroft Holmes - Memoirs, "The Greek Interpreter". The first appearance. Paget drew Mycroft as physically heavier and more imposing than his brother, faithful to Doyle's description and to the canonical detail that Mycroft is the smarter of the two.

Why the Paget illustrations matter to a modern Holmes site

Paget's plates entered the public domain in the United States in 1928 and globally through their copyright term lapsing in the early 1980s. They are free to use, free to print, free to redraw upon, free to enlarge for newspaper-style mastheads. They are the original Holmes art, drawn by the artist Doyle approved, in the magazine that built the audience.

A modern Holmes site that uses Paget - rather than Gillette-derived stage costumery, BBC-derived Cumberbatch portraits, or Frogwares-derived video-game stills - is choosing the artist Doyle worked with for two decades. There is no nostalgia in the choice. There is only fidelity.