"Gathering Flowers" By ~ Luke Fildes ~ 1843 - 1927.

Fildes is well-known for the coronation portraits of King Edward VII, painted in 1902, and of King George V painted a decade later. The bombast of these magnificent images, however, is not representative of his manner as a whole, and the sensitivity of the present portrait is far more typical. Fildes came late to painting, and his earliest work is as a graphic illustrator in a pre-Raphaelite manner that appealed to John Everett Millais, and led the later to recommend Fildes as an illustrator for Charles Dickens's last novel Edwin Drood. When Fildes took up painting in the 1870s it was in a vein of Dickensian realism much to the taste of the contemporary public, and one of his first public essays, the large canvas of Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward (Royal Holloway College) was rapturously received in 1874. Four years later Fildes was elected ARA and in 1887 was made a member of the Royal Academy.