George Sheringham

George Sheringham was a British decorative painter and designer of fans, theatrical costumes and scenery, posters, and book illustrations. As such, he designed ballet costumes and scene images for theatres, operas and ballets. Sheringham studied at King’s School in Gloucester and then at the Slade School of Art and at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Among the sets Sheringham designed were those for Love in a Village, The Duenna, The Skin Game and the Stratford Memorial Theatre’s opening production of Twelfth Night, as well as for Gilbert and Sullivan operas. His mural decorations included panels for the ballroom at Claridge’s Hotel, while among books he illustrated are Beerbohm’s The Happy Hypocrite and Edmond Rostand’s La Princesse Lointaine. He also was the author of Drawing in Pen and Pencil (1922) and Design in the Theatre (with James Laver) in 1927. In 1925 Sheringham was awarded the Paris Grand Prix for both architectural design and theatre design. Severely injured in 1932, Sheringham continued to paint still lifes of flowers after his injury.

In 1931 Sheringham produced a series of drawings of fish and fishing gear as illustrations for the “The Book of the Flyrod” by his brother Hugh Tempest Sheringham and John Cecil Moore. These were ink-and-pen drawings, some colored, some black-and-white. Salmon and Trout Flies, Sea Fish and Coarse Fish were three of a total of four pictorial plates printed in the multicolor collotype process.