Terrible & Beautiful

Few of the admirers of Sir Luke Fildes' work would recognize his name. Art critics pass him by sniffily. But his best-known painting has been reproduced as widely--in schoolbooks, ads, doctors' offices, and on postcards--as almost any in history. Last week Fildes' The Doctor turned up on a 3-c- stamp.

Fildes (rhymes with shields) would not have been too surprised. In the daguerreotypes of his heyday, Sir Luke looked like any well-fed Victorian gent, complete with goatee, chesterfield, and top hat. But he was more: a member of England's Royal Academy and a painter of royalty, including Edward VII, Queen Alexandra and George V.

Even before he began work on The Doctor in 1891 Sir Luke knew it would be a great success: "more terrible, perhaps, but yet more beautiful," than anything else he had done. A careful workman, he first built in his London studio, like a movie set, the cottage interior he intended to use.'Copying that on canvas, and painting the dawn stealing in the prop window, Fildes inserted the characters he had in mind: worried parents hovering in the shadows, their sick little girl feverishly sleeping in the light of an oil lamp, and the bearded doctor leaning over her, kindly and calm.

When he had it the way he wanted, Fildes began all over again, larger. The final version, which hangs in London's Tate Gallery, is still a great crowd-puller, but a less sentimental age no longer weeps openly at the sight of it, as visitors once did. The smaller first version is the proudest possession of the Guthrie Clinic in Sayre, Pa.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.