Paul Gordon Fildes, 1882-1971

Paul Gordon Fildes, the founder of the study of bacterial nutrition and one of the foremost microbiologists of the 20th century, was born on 10 February 1882 at 11 Melbury Road, Kensington, London, a large Victorian mansion standing in extensive grounds off the Addison Road and now converted into flats. He was the third of the seven children of Sir Luke Fildes K.C.V.O., R.A., a prominent painter of the Victorian era who began his professional career by illustrating books and periodicals, including Dicken’s Edwin Drood . He later became a fashionable portrait painter and painter of subjects with dramatic appeal of which ‘The Doctor’, exhibited in the Royal Academy of 1891, is the best known. Fildes’s mother was Fanny Woods, a sister of his father’s close friend and fellow academician Henry Woods. Of their first two children, one died in infancy. The second, Fildes’s elder brother, was born in 1879. A sister and two brothers followed and finally a second sister born in 1890. By all accounts they were a devoted family.