FILDES

Sir Luke, portrait and genre painter, was born in Liverpool in 1844, and received his artistic education at the South Kensington and Royal Academy Art Schools. His earliest productions were sketches in black-and-white for the Graphic, IWustrated London News, Corn hill Magazine, and other periodicals, and after being chosen to illustrate the last works of Dickens and Samuel Lover, he took to painting. His first picture was Nightfall (1868), and since then he has exhibited: The Loosened Team; The Hmpty Chair; Fair, Quiet, and Sweet Rest; Simpletons; Applicants for Admi ion to a Casual Ward; The Widower; The Return of the Penitent; The Village Wedding; Venetian Life; The A i Fresco Toilette; Tie Doctor; Portraits of the Duke and Duche of York (for the Graphic, 1893); also state portraits of the King (1902), and of the Queen (1905). Several of his paintings, and in particular the famous Casual Ward, show powers of realism in painting not unlike those of Dickens in fiction; but his later works are more striking from their colour-effects, A.R.A. in 1879, a full Academician in 1887, he was created a K.C.V.0. in 1918. He died in 1927.