A grieving father was once given the chance to paint anything he wanted, and out of all the subjects in the world, he chose to depict the worst night of his life... It's called The Doctor and it was made by British artist Luke Fildes in 1891. At first it looks like a simple scene: a doctor sits at the bedside of a sick child in a poor cottage, watching over her through the night. The little girl lies on a makeshift bed, two mismatched chairs pushed together. In the shadows behind them, the parents wait, the mother collapsed with her face in her hands, the father standing with one hand on her shoulder, helpless, staring at the doctor for any sign of hope. Fildes did not invent this scene, he lived it: on Christmas morning in 1877, his own first child, a little boy named Philip, died at the age of one. And through those final terrible hours, a doctor named Gustavus Murray sat with them, watching over the dying boy with a care and devotion that Fildes never forgot. Years later, the philanthropist Henry Tate commissioned Fildes to paint whatever he wished, no subject, no restrictions, complete freedom. And Fildes chose to go back to this: the sick child, the anguished parents, the doctor keeping his silent vigil, and poured into it everything he had felt as a father watching his son slip away, and everything he had seen in the one man who refused to leave the bedside... It's a father's grief and a father's gratitude, made permanent. The artist's other son, also Luke Fildes, wrote in his biography of his father: "Dr Murray became a symbol of professional devotion which would one day inspire the painting. The idea for The Doctor had been on my father's mind ever since Dr Murray watched over Philip."