Sidney Sime is another under-appreciated artist of the Golden Age, which is a shame, because he’s one of the strangest. This is Sidney Sime: Master of the Mysterious (1980), one of only four collections of his work, all out of print and all rather pricey. During his lifetime, he wasn’t terribly prolific — his largest, most well-known body of work was illustrating (and inspiring) early stories by Lord Dunsany. The largest extant collection of Sime’s work remains at Dunsany Castle.

Sime’s rather hard to pin down stylistically, I think. He often reminds me of Harry Clarke, who was a contemporary, but while Sime isn’t hesitant to be highly detailed or ornamental, he often combines line work and washes in ways that are surprising. These contrasts look like cells of cartoon animation, and give many of his illustrations a curiously anachronistic feeling. It’s so odd, but I can picture so many of these drawing moving.

Some really great stuff here. “The Incubus” is jaw-dropping in its subtly and its atmosphere, definitely a favorite. The castle of the Gibbelins and the house of the Gnoles are both nicely horrific (and are important influences on RPGs). Lots of skulls, lots of dragons, lots of weird lumpy creatures. I love how, like the Dunsany stories they illustrate, the art seems to depict mythology from an alternate world, free of the centuries of symbols and associations of our own. This makes Sime sometimes feel obscure, but also, as the title says, establishes him as a master of mysterious.