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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

His eldest son, John, serving as a midshipman in the Royal Navy, was killed in November 1914, in the loss of HMS Bulwark,[10][11] 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.

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.

A version of the Nancy Astor painting was originally given to the Houses of Parliament in 1924 to mark the historical occasion and was designed to hang on the grand staircase leading to the Committee Rooms.

[16]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.

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.

"[17] As Keeper, Sims had been commissioned to produce a portrait of the king, George V, to add to the Academy's complete series of British monarchs since its foundation.

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.

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.

[24] 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,[25] he committed suicide by drowning in the River Tweed near St. Boswells, Scotland, jumping from the Leaderfoot Viaduct with stones in his pockets.

"[27] Ultimately, to address the public's curiosity, all six of the exhibited Spiritual Ideas were illustrated in colour in the popular press;[17] a headline in the New York Times declared "Suicide's Pictures Make London Gasp.

"[29] 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:I wished to do subjects of tenderness and protection, to visualize a God of love.

In the other room [one sees] much that dates from the period when his powers were at their freshest and most natural, much that one would wish to linger over and remember.…But when the mists of time have descended, and art responsive in some mysterious way to the changing environments of the human spirit has found new forms of expression, will they still satisfy without reservation any more than, let us say, the work of Sir Noel Paton does at present?

The early paintings that established his career, like Childhood, "showed a whimsicality fashionable in Edwardian London but ultimately detrimental to a late-twentieth-century revival of interest in his work.

Alan Sims asserts that his father, beginning around 1909, painstakingly researched and developed a "method of painting in tempera with an oil finish" that was the most important of his contributions to the history of British Art.

The catalogue for the 1989 exhibit The Last Romantics at the Barbican Art Gallery (which included four works by Sims) repeated the notion that his final paintings were "apparently the product of a seriously disturbed mind.

[41] Ultimately, as the Bethlem acknowledges,At present we do not know much about his actual state of mind, but there seems little doubt that his painting was profoundly affected, both in style and content, by the mental turmoil which he was experiencing.