Hubert von Herkomer was born at Waal in the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1849. His father, a talented woodcarver, moved the family to England in 1857 and settled in Southampton. Von Herkomer studied at the Southampton School of Art, the Munich Academy and the South Kensington School of Art, where, like his fellow student Luke Fildes, he was much influenced by the work of Frederick Walker. Van Herkomer left Kensington in 1867 and embarked upon a career as a book and magazine illustrator. He found much of the work boring, but as a young man with radical political opinions, he was excited by the news that the social reformer, William Luson Thomas, planned to publish an illustrated periodical titled The Graphic. Herkomer sent him a drawing of a group of gypsies. Thomas accepted the unsolicited picture with alacrity and the following week, it appeared in the magazine. Herkomer was paid £8 and Thomas urged him to send in more of his work. Over the following years, Herkomer had a large number of his drawings published in The Graphic. However, unlike Luke Fildes and Frank Holl, Herkomer was not offered a full-time post on the magazine. Where as staff members were commissioned, freelance artists such as Herkomer had to find their own subject matter. Although he was angry when Thomas told him he was unwilling to employ him, he later admitted: ‘In my heart I bitterly resented these words, but they were the words I needed: they were the making of me as an artist.’ In 1869 he exhibited for the first time at the RA. Several of Herkomer’s engravings which appeared in The Graphic were later worked up into large-scale oil paintings. He exhibited The Last Muster – Sunday at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea at the RA in 1875. It touchingly depicted a group of aged army veterans attending a church service and announced in no uncertain terms von Herkomer’s arrival as an artist of distinction. The picture had originally appeared in The Graphic. As an oil painting, it was seven feet long and was sold to a photographic firm for £1,200. He subsequently exhibited a large number of memorable portraits, figure subjects and landscapes, in oil and water colour; he achieved marked success as a worker in enamel, as an etcher, mezzotint engraver and illustrative draughtsman. He composed operas, directed theatre productions and created backdrops. In the 1880s he concentrated his energies on the lucrative business of portraiture. He visited the USA and wrote to a friend: ‘I have three sitters every day. It seems like a dream that I can with my own honest handiwork make so much. In the two and a half months I shall have done thirteen portraits for money. These thirteen portraits bring me six thousand, six hundred and fourteen pounds sterling. I have already paid into my bank this year five thousand pounds, so I shall have in the nine months of this year over eleven thousand. Everybody wants to be painted now. Whenever I come to Boston again a clear year’s work is ready for me. This is not a wild speculation but a reality.’ Von Herkomer’s success as a portraitist delivered him a lifestyle comparable with his clients, despite which, he nevertheless continued to produce social realist paintings. This included the Pressing to the West (1884), Hard Times (1885) and On Strike (1891). He built his own house, ‘Lululaund’ at Bushey, Hertfordshire. He was elected ARA in 1879 and RA in 1890. He became an Associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1893, and a full Member in 1894. In 1885 von Herkomer was appointed Slade Professor at Oxford. Two of his pictures, Found (1885) and The Chapel of the Charterhouse (1889) are in the National Gallery. He exercised wide influence upon art education by founding a school of art in 1883 at Bushey, directing its affairs personally, until his retirement in 1904. He had some fairly well-developed opinions on the correct way to teach art, using a scheme of progressive study, centred around study from life. First, the students would study casts from life, then they would enter the life room, and only afterwards could they work from the antique. (This was the reverse of the system used in the RA Schools and South Kensington, where, in those days, students started with the antique and ended with the life class). The presiding idea was that the students would develop their own character as artists and then use the antique as examples of the ideal figure, rather than slavishly copying what they saw. In 1907 von Herkomer was knighted and he died in 1914. His portraits in oils of Sir Henry Tate (1897) and Lady Tate (c.1899) may be found in alcoves near the entrance of the Tate Gallery on Millbank in London.