1843 -1927 · Liverpool, London and Victorian painting

Urban misery, compassion, official portraits and Venetian scenes make Luke Fildes a major witness to British Victorian society.

Samuel Luke Fildes was born in Liverpool in 1843. After the Mechanics Institute and the Warrington School of Art, a scholarship allowed him to study at the South Kensington Art School then at the Royal Academy Schools. He began as an illustrator for Once a Week, Cornhill Magazine and especially The Graphic, whose social ambition corresponded to his desire to represent contemporary life. His drawing Houseless and Hungry inspired the large painting Candidates for Admission to an Occasional Care Service, exhibited in 1874: a line of poor people waits in the cold, without consoling anecdote, in front of the institution which could accommodate them. Fildes also illustrates Charles's last unfinished novel Dickens and painted The Empty Chair after his death. The Doctor, presented in 1891, concentrates his humanist painting: in a fishermen's interior, the doctor watches over a sick child while dawn joins the lamp. At the same time, his stays in Venice nourished luminous scenes like Daughter of the Lagoons. Elected academician in 1887, he then became a sought-after portrait painter and painted in particular Edward VII, Queen Alexandra and several public figures. Ennobled in 1906, Fildes died in London in 1927. His art united social observation, mastered narration and great precision of portraiture. The "Luke Fildes" selection notably compares The Doctor and Candidates for Admission in a occasional care service. His reading favors space.

Fildes gives the contemporary scene the gravity of history painting: emotion is born from waiting, light and the truth of gestures.