The Doctor by Sir Luke Fildes, c.1891 In 1890 Sir Henry Tate commissioned a painting from Luke Fildes, the subject of which was left to his own discretion. The artist chose to recall a personal tragedy of his own, when in 1877 his first son, Philip, had died at the age of one in his Kensington home: Fildes painted a young child in a rustic interior lying across two chairs, his pale face illuminated by the glass lamp on the table. The doctor, dressed in a tailored suit, sits beside the makeshift bed looking down at his patient anxiously. The boy’s father, standing in the background with his hand on the shoulder of his wife whose hands are clasped as if in prayer, looks in to the grave face of the doctor. Their humble lifestyle is evident from the pewter, the scrap of carpet on the stone floor and their ragged clothing. The extent of the youth’s illness can be seen by the half empty medicine bottle on the table, and the bowl and jug, used to relieve the boy’s temperature, on the bench. The bits of paper on the floor could be prescriptions made out by the doctor for medicine now already taken. Fildes described the shaft of daylight as signifying the imminent recovery of the child. He wrote: ‘At the cottage window the dawn begins to steal in – the dawn that is the critical time of all deadly illnesses – and with it the parents again take hope into their hearts, the mother hiding her face to escape giving vent to her emotion, the father laying his hand on the shoulder of his wife in encouragement of the first glimmerings of the joy which is to follow’.
Posted on: Sun, 09 Mar 2014 11:02:25 +0000
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