Sir Samuel Luke Fildes

SIR SAMUEL LUKE FILDES KCVO RA Liverpool 1843 - 1927 London Luke Fildes was born in Liverpool in 1844, the son of a Port Authority official. He was brought up by his grandmother Mary Fildes, a political reformer who had been injured in the 1819 Peterloo Massacre near Manchester. Fildes studied at the Mechanics’ Institute, Liverpool and Warrington School of Art. In 1863 he won a scholarship to study at the South Kensington Art School and subsequently at the Royal Academy Schools. By the late 1860s he was working as an illustrator for Cornhill Magazine and Once a Week. Fildes’s illustration Houseless and Hungry, showing paupers queuing for admission to the casual ward of a workhouse, appeared as a wood engraving in the first edition of The Graphic (4th December 1869). John Everett Millais brought it to the attention of Charles Dickens, who commissioned Fildes to illustrate what proved to be his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The unfinished novel was published posthumously in 1870 with twelve illustrations by Fildes. Luke Fildes developed the Houseless and Hungry image into Applicants for admission to a casual ward (Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, Egham), which was shown with some controversy at the Royal Academy in 1874. Fildes became one of the leading painters of the movement towards social realism which also included Frank Holl and Hubert von Herkomer. Among his last essays in this style is The Doctor, RA 1891 (Tate Britain, London), which depicts a physician watching over a mortally ill child in a cottage. This was exhibited to great acclaim and the print published by Agnew’s in 1892 proved extremely popular. Fildes married the artist Fanny Woods (fl. 1873-83; d.1927), sister of the painter Henry Woods, Fildes’s fellow pupil at Warrington School of Art. On his honeymoon journey in 1875 he began a series of Venetian subjects which he exhibited throughout the 1880s. He was elected ARA in 1879 and RA in 1887. By 1890 Luke Fildes’s chief preoccupation was society portraiture, including portraits of the Princess of Wales, RA 1894, Edward VII, RA 1902 and George V, 1912 (all in the British Royal Collection). He was knighted in 1906 and made KCVO in 1918. His success enabled him to commission a Queen Anne style house from Richard Norman Shaw at 11 Melbury Road, Kensington (1875-7). Luke Fildes died in February 1927 and the contents of his studio were auctioned at Christie’s on 24th June that year.