The Doctor

In 1890 the sugar magnate Henry Tate gave Luke Fildes a commission with no strings, the subject left entirely to the painter. Fildes reached back to his own worst morning. On Christmas Day in 1877 his first son, Philip, aged one, had died, and he never forgot the doctor who sat through the night with the boy. For the picture he built a fisherman's cottage in a corner of his studio so he could work out how lamplight fights the first grey dawn coming through the window. The doctor watches the sick child while the parents wait behind him, helpless. Shown in 1891, it became one of the most reproduced images in Victorian Britain, hung in countless homes as a portrait of what a good physician should be.