Sir Luke Fildes

Sir Luke Fildes , 1844-1927, English genre and portrait painter, b. Liverpool. He made drawings for the Graphic and other periodicals and illustrated Dickens's Edwin Drood. As a painter he excelled in depicting the life of the London poor. Later he specialized in portraiture and painted the coronation portraits of Edward VII and Queen Alexandra and a state portrait of George V. His Doctor (Tate Gall., London) is a well-known work.

Fildes, Sir Luke (b Liverpool, 18 Oct. 1844; d London, 27 Feb. 1927). English painter and illustrator. Early in his career he worked mainly as an illustrator, notably of Dickens's last novel, Edwin Drood (1870), but in the 1870s he turned increasingly to painting, achieving success particularly with scenes of social concern such as Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward (1874, Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, Egham; reduced replica in Tate, London). His last and most famous painting in this vein is The Doctor (1891, Tate, London), showing a kindly physician attending a seriously ill child in a working-class home. Its pathos made it one of the most popular pictures of the age—it was endlessly reproduced and was one of the star attractions when the Tate Gallery opened in 1897 ( Sir Henry Tate had commissioned it). Subsequently Fildes worked mainly as a fashionable portraitist. He also painted colourful Venetian genre scenes, typically featuring pretty girls—a great contrast to his sombre pictures dealing with poverty in Britain.