Walter Stanley Paget was a painter and illustrator who was born in London in 1863 and died in 1935. As a painter he exhibited six times with the Royal Academy, though he seems to have been more successful as an illustrator; he was commissioned to produce drawings for books by both Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stephenson. On occasions he signed his work ‘WAL’. He had two brothers who were also artists: Henry Marriot (1856–1936) and Sidney (1861–1908), who appears to have been the most successful. Sidney worked as a staff illustrator for the New Sphere magazine and in 1892–4 he created the iconic image of Arthur Conan Doyle’s super-sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, for the Strand magazine. The editor originally intended to commission Walter but the invitation was mistakenly addressed to Sidney, who nevertheless went on to use Walter as the model for Holmes.
