Jan Messenger invites us to visit Surrey’s hidden gem and uncover a comprehensive collection of fantasies, landscapes, portraits, character art and illustrations by Sidney Sime

Step inside the Sime Gallery, Worplesdon and you’ll find a collection of fascinating and highly characteristic works of the talented artist illustrator and caricaturist Sidney Sime, 1865-1941.

His black and white illustrations were in magazines of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s including The Pick Me Up, Pall Mall, The Idler, Eurek, The Butterfly and Illustrated London News.

The Gallery has some of the original pieces along with theatrical caricatures drawn between the years 1896-1898 including Sir Henry Irving and Dame Marie Tempest.

From the 102 articles for Through the Opera Glass in The Pick Me Up we know he also did caricatures of Dame Ellen Terry for the first wife of G F Watts, another local art gallery. Between 1909 and 1913 he designed theatre sets for Maeterlinck’s The Bluebird and Ibsen’s Pretenders for his wealthy Patron Lord Howard De Walden. His grandson Thomas Seymour is the Patron of the Sime Gallery today.

Sime also illustrated books for Lord Dunsany another aristocrat and friend whose fascination for fantasy drawing. Sime has painted in oils including many large fantasy art works as well as watercolours. He created a series entitled Bogey Beasts, mythical zoological creatures with the pictures and verses by Sime and music by Josef Holbrooke. His membership of London’s Langham sketching club and Yorik club provided Sime with congenial artistic companionship and there he met two of his greatest admirers, Arthur Lawrence and James Thorpe. He gained membership of the Royal Society of British Artists in 1896.

Sime took a six month visit to America in 1905 on the invitation of William Randolph Hurst, the American newspaper magnate, doing illustrations for him. After a short call up in 1918 in the Army Service corps, Sime’s passion for painting in oils saw him obsessed with the Visions of St John in the book of Revelation and he painted his own visions of the Apocalypse.

In 1924 he staged his well-received first exhibition in London. Now 100 years later there are two exhibitions, one at Christ Beetles art gallery, St James, London and later this year at Heath Robinson Museum, Pinner.

The Sime Gallery is open Wednesday and Sunday, 2-4pm with its Ta Ta café for tea and homemade cake, toilet facilities, free parking situated alongside recreational grounds in a beautiful village setting in Worplesdon.

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