More than Social Realists: Luke Fildes, Frank Holl and Hubert Herkomer

During the final quarter of the nineteenth century Luke Fildes (1843-1927), Hubert Herkomer (1849-1914) and Frank Holl (1845-1888) were among the most celebrated and influential of Victorian artists. However, despite the revival of interest in Victorian art in the late twentieth century, scholarly understanding of their work has become partial and narrow, focused predominantly on their magazine illustrations and powerful oil paintings depicting poverty and social deprivation, characterised as Social Realism. The primary aim of my thesis is to remedy this position by surveying and analysing the entirety of their artistic and professional careers, demonstrating the breadth of their subject matter and emphasising their prominent position within, and significant influence on, the Victorian art world. These artists adapted successfully to the dynamic and challenging nineteenth-century art market, responding to the decreasing saleability of social realist images by diversifying into other artistic spheres, including the highly competitive and potentially lucrative field of portrait painting. Their success as portraitists resulted in wealth, fame and celebrity status, enabling them to rise from disadvantaged backgrounds to eventual recognition as prominent and authoritative members of the art-professional and social elite. I argue that analysis of their work draws attention to the social dichotomies and tensions that existed in Victorian Britain, and, indeed, within the lives and careers of Holl, Herkomer and Fildes themselves. Their work ranged from their graphic social realist depictions of poverty to lucrative portraiture of powerful, wealthy and influential sitters, including royalty, vividly demonstrating the extremes of poverty and affluence in nineteenth-century Britain. My thesis contends that new critique of the work of these artists creates an original understanding of the enterprising commercial art market within Victorian Britain, the role of critics, dealers and the art-professional bodies, the social mobility achievable by the successful artist and the increasing democratisation of art reflected by the newfound predominance of industrialists, entrepreneurs and professionals as purchasers and collectors. Fildes, Herkomer and Holl are prime exemplars of the power of art and artists in the cultural and economic life of Victorian Britain. Their work continues to be displayed, reproduced and circulated. This belated, yet apposite, reappraisal will not only enable a new understanding of the complex social and artistic factors influencing the professional life of the Victorian artist but also provide a re-assessment of Luke Fildes, Hubert Herkomer and Frank Holl as manifestly more than Social Realists.

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