This dissertation discusses three Victorian artists, Luke Fildes, Hubert Herkomer, and Frank Holl, who emerged partly or mainly through their drawinsg for the Graphic magazine. All used images of the poor created for this work as motifs for major paintings which have come to be called 'social-realist', and all went on to devote their careers largely to portraiture. Yet to group them this way, and to apply the 'social-realist' label can be deeply misleading, firstly because they never worked together as a 'movement' with an ideology or manifesto, secondly because the label has more radical or socially-critical connotations as applied to other movements of that name in the twentieth century, and thirdly because it was applied only retrospectively in the twentieth century in the wake of those movements, implying ideological comparability
