Study for The Return of the Penitent no 66

Sir (Samuel) Luke Fildes (1843-1927) was a major English illustrator and painter. He was born in Liverpool, the son of a shipping agent. He attended evening classes in art at the Mechanics' Institute, Chester, and moved to London in 1863 having won a scholarship to study at the Government Art Training School, South Kensington; an institution linked to the South Kensington Museum, now the V&A. He went on to study at the Royal Academy Schools. He started his artistic career as an illustrator, with a strongly realist style based on direct drawings from nature. When Fildes began to exhibit oil paintings he quickly developed a radical form of "social realist" painting, combining the campaigning subject matter of contemporary journalism and novelists such as Dickens - the urban poor and the effects of industrialization - with the scale and rhetoric of traditional history painting.

This drawing is one of 265 works acquired by the museum through descent from the artist (museum numbers E.451-715-2003). The V&A is the principal repository of Fildes's drawings, having received major gifts in 1971, 1977 and 1987. The bequest of 1971 (E.580-981-1971) was from the son of the artist, Sir Paul Fildes, O.B.E., F.R.S. Sir Paul had compiled a Catalogue raisonné of the published reproductions of Luke Fildes's drawings, revised in 1965, but which remained unpublished; a typescript of this is in the National Art Library (formerly E.981-1971, now L.5859-1975, pressmark 86.W.71). This provided much information about the works which made up the gift. The bequest of 1977 was from Mrs Kitty Whittaker-Ellis, daughter of the artist (E.1704-1804-1977), and that of 1987 came via another daughter, Mrs Cedric Ripley, (E.65-142-1987). The 2003 gift similarly descended from the family and ranges from slight sketches, to worked up designs, probably for Fildes's published illustrative works.