This painter, illustrator and designer was closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelites through Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown. He was born in Hartlepool and brought up in extreme poverty, and as a young man was employed on hack-work for commercial engravers. He managed to study at evening classes in London and then in Manchester, where he settled in about 1848. His illustrations to Defoe and Bunyan were noticed by Ruskin and Rossetti, and he met the latter in 1864. Shields was a deeply religious man, and a great admirer of Blake, as poet artist and mystic. By the 1880s Shields had become one of Britain’s foremost painters of large scale religious schemes. His style evolved over his career through Pre-Raphaelitism to Art Nouveau.

Shields made numerous chalk drawings, and experimented with French ‘compressed charcoal’, which he showed Rossetti who adopted the material himself, for his larger studies. We have inferred the identity of the sitter in this lively drawing from another drawing bought with this one, the same face, which is inscribed with his name and occupation.