An English designer, painter, illustrator & writer, George Charles Haité's most famous work is the iconic cover design of the Strand Magazine, launched in 1891, which helped popularize the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. Haité was also a founder member and the first president of the London Sketch Club.

His friend, the great war correspondent Frederic Villiers, noted that: "I never met a man who was so rapid with brush and colours in transferring an impression to his canvas. His memory is so marvelously correct that one may watch him produce, within an hour or so, a sketch of a Dutch market-place with its greyness of atmosphere, a street in Bruges with the architectural beauty ...