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The Love Letter |
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Oil on Canvas, 28 x 21 inches, 71.1 x 53.3 cm |
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Inventory # |
Inventory# 12649
Sir Samuel Luke Fildes RA
British, 1843-1927
British artist Sir Samuel Luke Fildes lived from 1843 to 1927. Born in Liverpool, Fildes studied at the Warrington School of Art, and at the South Kensington schools. Initially a magazine illustrator, through a recommendation from J.E. Millais, Fildes was commissioned by Dickens to illustrate his last novel, Edwin Drood. By the 1870’s the artist had turned from illustration to painting.
In 1874, his large picture of “Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward” brought him overnight success. The painting was praised for its Dickensian realism, honesty and lack of affectation. Fildes, along with Frank Holl and Hubert von Herkomer, began to paint modern-life pictures of a very different kind – larger, grimmer, even more realistic, and focusing on the problems of poverty in a much more sensational way then their contemporaries.
Although receiving success for these social documentary subjects and genre scenes, it was really his portraits that brought Fildes true fame, leading to a series of royal commissions in the early part of the twentieth century. In 1894 he painted the Princess of Wales, Edward VII in 1902, and George V in 1912. The climax of Fildes’s career was a commission to paint the coronation portraits of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, for which he was knighted. Fildes was elected to the Royal Academy in 1887. The artist died, rich and famous, in 1927.
Provenance:
Frost and Reed Gallery, London (Inventory # 17849, label verso)
Private Collection, Toronto
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