Charles Sims

In 1920, he was appointed Keeper, or head, of the Royal Academy Schools, a post he was eventually forced to resign in 1926. At the same time, he became estranged from his wife and children. Sims' final paintings, the Spiritual Ideas, were to some viewers his "most beautiful works," but to others highly disturbing. He committed suicide in 1928.

• Name — Charles Sims • Born — 28 January 1873 • Birthplace — Islington, England • Place of death — St. Boswells, Scotland • Years Active — 1886-1928 • Education — Académie Julian, Royal Academy Schools (expelled) • Works — An Island Festival (1907); Clio and the Children (1913/15); the Spiritual Ideas (series, 1927-28)

Born in Islington, London, Sims was the son of a costume manufacturer. An injury in infancy threatened his life and resulted in lifelong lameness in one leg. His earliest memories were of painful physiotherapy, and as a child he was unable to fully participate in physical activities. This disability was to have a profound influence on his work as an artist. As his son and biographer Alan Sims writes, "His lameness…remained always a considerable burden," and "had much to do with the peculiar direction of his art towards playful subjects and athletic technique," so that "the most notable characteristics" included "a prepossession with the swift movement of flawless bodies bathed in sunlight and air" and "a determination to escape from the actual confines of physical life into a region of his own fancy.…The charm of his happiest pictures is heightened by this pathos." Initially apprenticed in the drapery business, at age 14 he was sent to Paris, where he learned French. Turning his back on a mercantile career, he decided to study art, and in 1890 enrolled at the South Kensington College of Art before moving back to Paris for two years at the Académie Julian. In the need of bursaries to support himself, he moved back to London and enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools in 1893, but "his Parisian insolence and cavalier ways alienated the authorities, and in 1895 he was unceremoniously expelled." Despite the expulsion, Sims "had gained the confidence to start painting bacchanalian scenes of revelry, executed with astonishing flair," including The Vine in 1896, his first painting to be exhibited at the Royal Academy. In 1897 he exhibited Childhood, which "established his mastery of the effects of sunlight"; it was shown at the Paris Salon of 1900 and purchased by the French State (it is now at the Musée d'Orsay). He specialized in neo-classical fantasies, typically idealized scenes of women and children (and sometimes fairies and fauns) in outdoor settings. He also found success as a painter of society portraits. In 1897, he married Agnes, a daughter of the painter John MacWhirter. She and their children, sometimes captured in photographs, would become frequent models and subjects in his paintings. In 1906, a one-man show at the Leicester Galleries brought him critical and financial success, allowing him to relocate to rural Fittleworth and then Lodsworth, both villages near Petworth, West Sussex. In 1907 he painted An Island Festival, "possibly his masterpiece." In 1910, The Art Journal declared him "The very Ariel of the Academy…This is the art which Keats imagined in his 'Ode on a Grecian Urn,' 'For ever panting and for ever young.'" In 1910 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Watercolour Society, and in 1915 to the Royal Academy. The "breezy, sunny, outdoor subjects" for which he became known were partly inspired by holidays in Arran in Scotland and later at Bruges in Belgium and at Étaples in France, where there was an international artists' colony. In 1921, art critic P.G. Konody reflected on Sims' body of joyous paintings:Life is an eternal Arcadian holiday for him.…The key-note of his art is an intense joie de vivre. And this joie de vivre expressed in his paintings is contagious. The serene happiness of Sims' art makes the spectator forget all the worries and tribulations and petty concerns of his daily life. The New York Times found in Sims' works "an individuality incapable of dullness or heaviness," and "an unquenchable sprit." • Illustration — "What are these to me and you who deeply drink of wine?" (1895) • Illustration — Childhood (1897) • Illustration — A Fairy Wooing (1898) • Illustration — Dame Lilian Braithwaite (c. 1902) • Illustration — The Little Faun (version of 1905–1906) • Illustration — An Island Festival (1907) • Illustration — The Fountain (1907/8) • Illustration — Kenneth Clark (c. 1911) • Illustration — The Wood Beyond the World (1913) • Illustration — "...and the fairies ran away with their clothes" (n.d.)

The First World War was a deeply traumatic experience for Sims. His eldest son, John, serving as a midshipman in the Royal Navy, was killed in November 1914, in the loss of HMS Bulwark, a blow that caused Sims in 1915 to add to his idyllic work Clio and the Children, staining the scroll of the Muse of History with red paint to represent blood. "Sims believed that the War had violated the innocence of future generations. He felt that History could no longer be personified as a beautiful goddess passing on wisdom but that she had more violent lessons to teach." Sims's son is among the missing commemorated on the Portsmouth Naval Memorial. • Illustration — Marriage, from The Seven Sacraments of the Holy Church (1917). In February 1917, Sims exhibited a suite of austere, idiosyncratic, deliberately archaic paintings depicting The Seven Sacraments of the Holy Church. According to his son Alan, "Nobody knew what to make of them." Their present location is unknown, and they are today the least-known of his works. In 1918, he traveled to France as an official war artist, painting a series of devastated landscapes. He also painted works memorializing the war dead, using the imagery of the Crucifixion. In Greater Love Hath No Man (1916), his own son appears on a cross, with members of the family below. Another crucifixion on a much larger scale and with panoramic details, with Christ on the cross, became Sims' contribution to the Canadian War Museum, Sacrifice (1919). In 1920 Sims was commissioned to decorate the ceiling of the Institute of Civil Engineers in Great George Street, Westminster, and the result was a more conventional but still "highly inventive" paean to the war effort, wherein "a figure of Victory swoops down, surrounded by a billowing Union Jack and holding the victor's laurels, although it also serves as a wreath for the dead. At the edges people crane their necks to peer upwards…and a biplane, emblem of modernity, crosses the composition." Victory wears a hood and most of her face cannot be seen. • Illustration — Clio and the Children (1913/15) • Illustration — Greater Love Hath No Man (1916) • Illustration — Dawn over the battlefields of Vimy, Loos, Mons, Trones (c. 1918) • Illustration — The Old German Front Line, Arras, 1916 (1919) • Illustration — Sacrifice (1919) • Illustration — Study for Ceiling Painting for the Great Hall of the Institute of Civil Engineers (c. 1920)

• Illustration — Introduction of Lady Astor as the First Woman MP (c. 1919) In the last decade of his life, Sims' work became increasingly controversial. In 2019, a surviving version of the painting, on loan from The Box, Plymouth, was put on display in the Member's Dining Room in the Palace of Westminster to mark the centenary of Astor taking her seat. • Illustration — George V (surviving version, c. 1924) In 1920, Sims was appointed Keeper, or head, of the Royal Academy Schools, an ironic achievement for a man who had himself been expelled as a student. The position included a residence in Burlington House, and "placed him at the very heart of the organisation, as the guardian of future generations of painters rigorously drilled in the traditional methods of drawing and composition." A surviving, smaller version of Sims' portrait of George V is kept at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. In 1925, Sims was commissioned to contribute to "The Building of Britain," a series of historical paintings by various artists in St. Stephen's Hall of the Palace of Westminster in London. Unveiled in 1927, King John assents to Magna Carta attracted criticism from the press, Members of Parliament and other artists for its idiosyncrasy. Added to these professional tribulations and lingering grief for his son was upheaval in Sims' personal life. His biographer H. Cecilia Holmes suggests that Sims took as his mistress Vivienne Jeudwine, whose portrait with her son (possibly by Sims) he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1924. Another portrait of Jeudwine by Sims, undated, is unabashedly intimate. His affair with Jeudwine eventually ended, but Sims was irreconcilably estranged from his wife, Agnes. When he vacated the Keeper's residence at Burlington House in June, 1926, "he did not return to his wife and children—by this stage his marriage was dead in all but name—but embarked upon a series of foreign trips and long-term spells as a guest in the homes of friends." • Illustration — The Sands at Dymchurch (c. 1920-2) • Illustration — King John assents to Magna Carta (1925-1927) • Illustration — Mrs. Jeudwine and her son Wynne (1924) • Illustration — Portrait of Vivienne Jeudwine, undated

• Illustration — Crowds of Small Souls in Flame (1927) Abandoning portraiture and representational painting altogether, Sims embarked on the final phase of his creative career, which resulted in a series of paintings that would be termed the Spiritual Ideas. They depict visually smeared and abstracted maelstroms of cosmic energy in which naked and contorted figures are overwhelmed by gigantic, personified forces; their enigmatic content and Sims' apparent turn to a modernist style startled and confused the artistic establishment. Critics likened the paintings to the works of El Greco, William Blake, Wassily Kandinsky, and the Italian Futurists. In private letters from March 1928, Sims wrote of his "acute mental distress," saying that "something has happened far away, something that I need have no shame in telling you one day"; it is believed he was referring to his estrangement from his wife, which further isolated him as he was grieving the loss of his son. On 13 April 1928, weeks before a Royal Academy exhibition including six of Sims' Spiritual Ideas was to open on 7 May, he committed suicide by drowning in the River Tweed near St. Boswells, Scotland, jumping from the Leaderfoot Viaduct with stones in his pockets. Contemporary viewers of the exhibition were concerned about the content of the paintings, especially with regard to Sims' mental health and subsequent suicide, and saw critical reception of the exhibition as insensitive. The RA president, Sir Frank Dicksee, who had previously overseen the destruction of Sims' portrait of George V, said the paintings were "in marked contrast to all his previous work," indicating "a violent change of mentality." Ultimately, to address the public's curiosity, all six of the exhibited Spiritual Ideas were illustrated in colour in the popular press; a headline in the New York Times declared "Suicide's Pictures Make London Gasp." Months later, when four of the Spiritual Ideas were shown in the United States as part of the annual Carnegie International, they "were unquestionably the profound sensation of that exhibition." Sims' state of mind was addressed by Frank Rutter, critic of The Sunday Times: "A man who has been suffering from continued insomnia may well not be responsible for his actions, but he is not necessarily insane. To suggest that there are traces of mania in these last and most beautiful works from his brush betrays a lamentable lack of understanding, and is an undeserved slight on the memory of a sweet and reasonable painter." Sims himself, in a posthumously published essay, reflected on the Spiritual Ideas: Alan Sims wrote of his father's suicide: "He himself followed out his Epicureanism to its logical conclusion, and ceased to live when he ceased to believe in future happiness." • Illustration — Saints and Sinners (c. 1927) • Illustration — Man's Last Pretence of Consummation in Indifference (c. 1927) • Illustration — I Am the Abyss and I Am Light (1928) • Illustration — My Pain Beneath Your Sheltering Hand (c. 1928)

• Clio and the Children, 1913 and 1915, Royal Academy of Arts • King John assents to Magna Carta, 1925–1927, Palace of Westminster • The Fountain, 1907–8; The Wood Beyond the World, 1913; The Sands at Dymchurch, c.1920–2; I Am the Abyss and I Am Light, 1928, Tate • A Camouflaged Quarry: Between Chérisy and Hendicourt, 1916; "Sacrifice": Study for the painting in Ottawa, 1918; The Land of Nod (poster), 1917, Imperial War Museums • Dame Lilian Braithwaite, c. 1902, The Garrick Club Collections • of a Young Man; Aspiration, 1927; Crowds of Small Souls in Flame, 1927; A Spiritual Idea, 1927; Swing; My Pain Beneath Thy Sheltering Hand, 1927, Bethlem Museum of the Mind

• Two Girls Seated: Diana and Sarah Churchill, 1922, National Trust, Chartwell. • The Little Faun, version of 1905–1906, The Fitzwilliam Museum; The Little Faun, version of 1908, Royal Cornwall Museum • Introduction of Lady Astor as the First Woman MP, c. 1919, The Box, Plymouth • What Are These to Me and You Who Deeply Drink of Wine?, 1895, Leeds Art Gallery • An Interrupted Picnic, 1901, Cartwright Hall • Man's Last Pretence of Consummation in Indifference, 1927, Ulster Museum • George V, c. 1924, Scottish National Portrait Gallery • Mrs. MacWhirter, City Art Centre, Edinburgh

• L'Enfance (Childhood), 1897, Musée d'Orsay • Sacrifice, c. 1918, Canadian War Museum • Child Worship, c. 1909, Cleveland Museum of Art • An Island Festival, 1907, Art Gallery of New South Wales • By Summer Seas, c. 1904; Figure of a Woman c. 1905; The Death of the Year, 1910-1912, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa • Bacchanalia, n.d., Hermitage Museum

An auction record for a work by Charles Sims was set by In Elysium, auctioned for £36,000 at Sotheby's London in 2006, then equivalent to $66,212.

Charles Sims was born on 28 January 1873 in Islington. Sims held the nationality of United Kingdom. Sims was educated at Académie Julian.

A reference to Charles Sims and his work is made in Robert Aickman's story "Ravissante," where his paintings are described: "apparently confused on the surface, even demented, they made one doubt while one continued to gaze, whether the painter had not in truth broken through to a deep and terrible order."