Walter Dendy Sadler 1854-1923

London, Lefevre's Gallery, 1895;
London, Richard Green Gallery, A Fine Collection of Nineteenth Century Paintings, 2001

'Among that crowd of English humorous and satirical painters which includes such masters as Hogarth, the first and greatest of the body... who - avoilding politics, "Sport", personalities, and sentimental themes - has succeeded in bringing into daylight again "the tea-cup times of hoop and hood", as well as those of the Regency, and confined himself to the bougeois, is Mr. Dendy Sadler, in whose honour a numerous exhibition of pictures is now open in King Street, St James's' (F. G. Stephens, 'Walter Dendy Sadler - Humorist and Genre Painter', Art Journal, 1895, pg. 193)

The exhibition mentioned in Stephens' introduction to a review of Dendy Sadler's work was that held at the Lefevre Gallery in 1895 which included the wonderful London to York, Time's Up Gentleman offered here. As Stephens noted, coaching subjects were a favourite of Sadler's who '... has more than once revived the old-fashioned humours and quaint incidents of travel by stages, vans, and those more stately "machines," as during the last century they were called - splendid vehicles which, all gleaming in scarlet and gold, carried His Majesty's mails and about a dozen passengers besides... the unusually large 'London the York,' which shows how travellers by coach halted at country inns.'' (ibid. pp. 194-8)

London to York, Time's Up Gentlemen depicts a jovial scene in a comfortable coaching inn on the road between London and York, where a group of travellers take a welcome break from the journey to sip tea and exchange gossip and flirtation or even to receive a shave.  It is presumably morning as the table is laid for breakfast and the suggestion is that the travellers have spent the night at the inn. The driver of the coach has entered the parlour to request that his passengers prepare themselves to re-board the coach for the next leg of their journey. Sadler was skilled at capturing amusing incidents of human life, set in the early nineteenth century in which the figures are animated both by convincing gesture and varied expression. It would appear from the costumes and decoration of the inn that London to York is set in the 1820s or 1830s in the age of George IV and William IV, a period which was percieved with nostalgia to be wholesome. Literature such as Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers enforced this notion of the early years of the century. As another writer on Sadler's work noted in 1896 '... he takes the style of period which he illustrates; his art is in sympathy with its technique, the technique of Collins, Webster, Wilkie - a period when finish are carefulness were valued high... Mr. Sadler, in taking his subjects from middle-class life, has treated them without exaggeration... he paints the comedy of human life frankly and broadly at the same time, with a keen eye for the discrimination of character.' (W. L. Woodroffe, 'W. Dendy Sadler', The Magazine of Art, 1896, pg. 265). Stephens categorised these type of works by Sadler as depicting the '... follies and weakness of men and women, and does so in a thoroughly good-natured way to which even those men and women themselves can hardly object, while some of the number might be expected to be grateful to the genial satarist who, not unkindly has held before them that mirror of humour in which they may 'see themselves as others see them'.' (ibid. pg. 198)