Walter Dendy Sadler RBA (1854-1923) was an ingenious, highly appreciated English painter of witty genre scenes and a member of the Royal Society of British Artists.
Born in Dorking, Surrey, Sadler’s father was a solicitor and evidently expected his progeny to follow suit. However, from an early age, it became clear that the young man was destined for altogether different pursuits. His initial education was undertaken at Horsham School where, much to the fury of his teachers, he crammed the pages of textbooks with impromptu sketches. In his autobiography, he recalls how the schoolmaster requested his books for examination, only to find them brimming with caricatures of himself, the other students and ships. Indeed, his interest in seafaring led to his first commission at the age of 12, for which he prepared a series of watercolours of yachts for the saloon of a large schooner.
Following his schooling, the artistic young man toiled for a few months in an office, perhaps at his father’s behest. But, once again, his hours were spent doodling on his blotting pad, producing amusing portraits of his colleagues. At this point, he was determined to pursue a career in the arts and sought training in London.
He trained at Heatherly's Art School in Newman Street until 1871 before travelling to Düsseldorf to study under James Moulton Burfield (1845-1888) and Wilhelm Simmler (1840-1923). Burfield was particularly influential and described as a genre painter of the ‘neo-Rococo’ style. Given Sadler’s ample skill as a draughtsman, it’s little surprise that, by the age of 19, he’d debuted at both the Dudley Gallery and the Royal Academy.
While still a student, he commenced a series of playful works depicting the various aspects of monastic life, which garnered attention from both critics and patrons. These were far from ascerbic and presented their observations in a lighthearted manner, which even the monks themselves found amusing. Indeed, the Sub-Prior of the Capucine Monastery at Crawley reassured him as such: “I know your pictures well,” he said, “and, whilst showing up the amusing side of the monk's life, you never hold them up to ridicule.”
This gentle and rather wholesome fashion of describing a narrative became a trademark of his approach, with a critic at The Art Journal stating that he “can lay his hand upon his heart and boast that his pencil has defamed no woman nor maligned a man”. In this respect, his choice of historical subjects, often from the Georgian period, aided their sense of abstraction. Victorians saw his critiques as relatable yet not insulting - although there was more than a little ‘tongue in cheek’ at times.
Following a period in London, he moved to Hemingford Grey in St Ives, Huntingdonshire, where he created quite a fuss with the locals. Many of them would model for him, all too eager to play dress up and pose themselves intriguingly. His perfectionism led to him assembling one of the finest collections of period outfits in England, and he would travel miles for the right piece. He was tireless in his pursuit of accurately capturing the minutiae of a figure and interior.
At Hemingford, he owned a charming old country house, which nestled on the picturesque banks of the River Ouse and looked out across acres of meadows. It provided ample inspiration, and he was often spotted musing by the waterway, deep in contemplation, or working in the garden on a large canvas.
Sadler’s career blossomed to the point whereby thousands of prints were sold and, for a time, he was considered as the leading artist in his field. His works were accessible, finely detailed, and “painted as he lived”.
He’s represented in numerous public collections, including The British Museum, V&A, Tate Britain, Walker Art Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery.
Exhibited
Royal Academy, Royal Society of British Artists, The Dudley Gallery.
Public Collections
The British Museum, V&A Museum, Tate Britain, National Portrait Gallery, Joslyn Art Museum, Burton Art Gallery and Museum, Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, City Hall in Cardiff, Grundy Art Gallery, Guildhall Art Gallery, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Laing Art Gallery, Manchester Art Gallery, Norris Museum, Sudley House, Touchstones Rochdale, Towneley Hall Art Gallery & Museum, Walker Art Gallery, Williamson Art Gallery & Museum.
Timeline
1854
Born in Dorking, Surrey, to John Dendy Sadler, a solicitor, and Kitty Sadler.
1861
Lived in Dorking with his parents, six siblings and three staff.
1870-1871
Studied at Heatherly's School of Art in London.
1871
Lived at the Red Lion in Ockley, Surrey, while studying. Occupation recorded as ‘Art Student’.
Studied in Düsseldorf under James Moulton Burfield (1845-1888) and Wilhelm Simmler (1840-1923).
1872
Debuted at the Dudley Gallery with ‘A Partial Critic’.
1873
Debuted at the Royal Academy with ‘The Deciding Game’.
1881
Married Amelia Louisa Pratt at St Mary, Sunbury on Thames, Church Street, Surrey.
Lived at Finchley Road, Marylebone, with his wife, Amelia Louisa Sadler, brother George, and a servant. Occupation recorded as ‘Artist (Painter)’.
1891
Lived at Finchley Road, Marylebone, with his wife, three daughters, two sons, and three staff. Occupation recorded as ‘Artist painting figure subjects.’
1901
Lived in Hemingford Grey, St Ives, Huntingdonshire, with his daughter Kate and three staff. Occupation recorded as ‘Artist Painter’.
1911
Lived in Hemingford Grey, St Ives, Huntingdonshire, with his two daughters and two staff. Occupation recorded as ‘Artist (Painter)’.
1921
Lived in Hemingford Grey, St Ives, Huntingdonshire, with his daughter Kate and a servant. Occupation recorded as ‘Artist (Painter)’.
1923
Died in Hemingford Grey, St Ives, Huntingdonshire.
Reviews
The Art Journal (1895)
"Among that crowd of English humorous and satirical painters which includes such masters masters as Hogarth, the first and greatest of the body, and Mr. Haynes-Williams, our able contemporary working in the Hogarthian strain, the only one who, avoiding 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 bourgeois, is Mr. Dendy Sadler, in whose honour a numerous exhibition of pictures is now open in King Street, St. James's.
Mr. Haynes-Williams delights in those gallantries of the Assembly Rooms of Leamington, Brighton and Cheltenham, which had succeeded the braveries of 'The Bath' of Gainsborough and Harrogate's health-giving springs. Not so with the subjects of Mr. Dendy Sadler's canvases, most of whom actually belong to our grandfather's later days, when George the Fourth was king.
In another way, our present subject differs from his forerunners. Gillray, Rowlandson, Bunbury, Woodward, Cruikshank, Seymour, the Doyles, Leech, H. K. Browne, R. Caldecott, and C. Keene have followed each other into those happy shades where satire has no sting, nor sardonic wit a sigh. The cruel bludgeon and the stabbing knife, the infamous suggestions, coarse abuse of caricature itself, and the keener etching-needles of the later detraction, obloquy and backbiting, had in turn yielded to better taste, and the days when Pope himself dared not attack Hogarth were gone by. Each satiric artist became more gentle, not to say humane, than his immediate forerunners, and provinces of the satiric realm were appropriated by one artist or another, and each kept to his own.
Among those who employ types, rustical, homely, and pathetic, and who for their subjects affect the ways, amusements, and homely doings of a hundred years ago, none is more eminent than the artist, some of whose best pictures are reproduced in these pages. He too, like Leech and Keene, can lay his hand upon his heart and boast that his pencil has defamed no woman nor maligned a man. We see how faithful to nature his types are, and yet nobody needs to be pitied as the victims of Pope and Churchill are always pitied. Nor, on the other hand, are his men and women nearly so impersonal - not to say unreal - as those generalisations of character Caldecott gave us for models and patterns, so to say, of the genus huntsman, but not huntsmen individually at all.
Besides these points of difference, Mr. Dendy Sadler's range of subjects, choice of which implies great resources, is, as we shall see, much wider than Caldecott's, while as a painter of pictures in oil, each demanding months for its execution, he cannot be compared with Charles Keene, Richard Doyle, or John Leech, who, at the rate of hundreds every year, made innumerable drawings on wood by a much simpler process. It would be fair to compare a dozen Dendy Sadlers with a similar number of the works of either of the men he in art or inventive power most resembles, and in no other way can his position be discovered and established. Such a comparison would not be to the disadvantage of the living artist. As a painter he comes near, on the one hand, to Leslie, that prince of artists, humorous designers, and painters of comedy; and, on the other hand, he approaches Mr. Orchardson, a capital master, who has never attempted to cover so wide a field as Mr. Dendy Sadler, but triumphs as a sardonic illustrator of some of today's vices; he is still less remote from Mr. Marks, who is great in touching lightly the ridiculous side of certain enthusiasms; while Mr. Yeames has sometimes, but not too often, done admirably where modern moods, fancies, and follies were in question.
Like Mr. Marks, when he painted those prime pieces of humour: 'Toothache in the Middle Ages,' 'The Franciscan Sculptor,' and similar works, Mr. Dendy Sadler has opened new vistas in that, to us, dim and cloudy region - the monastic and civil life of mediæval times, touched its records with new light, and, with vitalising spirit, made some of the men of old to live anew. Again, like Mr. Marks, whose masterpiece is 'The Three Jolly Post-Boys’, Mr. Dendy Sadler 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.
Not less a master of character than the famous Royal Academician we have just named, worthy to be compared with him as a humorist, and in repeatedly and powerfully touching, profoundly tender chords of sorrow, which Mr. Marks has avoided altogether, our present subject stands as much apart from him on the one side, as on the other he is remote from the elegant amenities, somewhat hot-pressed courtesies and urbane graces of Mr. Haynes Williams's pleasant and comely realm. Our artist's exact place as a designer as well as a student of character is midway between Mr. Marks and Mr. Haynes-Williams, and, strangely enough, he is, as an artist, in a similar position. Thus, as a real master of composition, he is superior to the R.A., and not, technically speaking, quite so deft and clever as the 'outsider.'
His touch is not so hard as Mr. Marks's, nor are the surfaces of his pictures so polished as those of the gentler genre painter, while, as to finish, neither of his compeers is equal to him. A better painter of the carnations than either of them, Mr. Dendy Sadler's representation of the human face and form is truer, because less adust and arid than that of the Academician; more brilliant and solid and less quaint-like than that of the 'outsider,' whose flesh painting, at its best, is defective in limpidity, and, above all, is lacking in the inner gold and greys of the Venetians and their follower, Mr. H. Cook. These are the general characteristics and qualities of our painter's art. How they were developed, and which of his pictures represent them best, may, with so much of his biography as the theme requires, be told as follows.
The son of a solicitor settled at Dorking, a member of a family originally from Horsham, and, if the name they bore goes for anything, of old English blood, Walter Dendy Sadler was, in 1854, born at the pleasant town so celebrated for poultry and for lime. At Horsham he went to school, and there, after the manner of many incipient artists, illustrated his primers and dictionaries with sketches and studies of a sort such as moved the ire of his teachers, who, nevertheless, thought so well of the artist that they invariably captured and preserved these exercises of a vagrant scholar. Remaining at Horsham till he was sixteen years of age, and determining to become a painter, the tyro, after some lessons from a local artist, came to London and entered Heatherly's Art School in Newman Street, where he remained till 1871.
Then, going to Düsseldorf, he made further studies under Herr W. Simmler, a man of note at that time and place, who, being much impressed with the abilities of his pupil, offered to teach him for nothing. Young as he was, Mr. Dendy Sadler's progress must have been very honourable; and so rapid that, in 1872, being then barely eighteen, he made his debut in the Dudley Gallery with No. 279, a picture called 'A Partial Critic,' the pretensions of which, as thirty guineas was asked for it, must have been greater than ordinary. Mr. Dendy Sadler continued to exhibit in this gallery - a place made memorable by poor Haydon's disasters within its dungeon-like walls - till 1881, when ‘A Feast Day' appeared there.
The Royal Academy first knew Mr. Dendy Sadler as an exhibitor in 1873, when he sent to Burlington House a small picture called ‘The Deciding Game.' The next work of note from his hands marked his true and original sense of the domestic side of conventual life during the Middle Ages, when the brethren had to depend upon their fishponds for their Friday's dinners; and, in 1875, he illustrated ‘Steady! Brother; steady!' the warning of a brown-frocked Franciscan to his brother monk, who had just hooked a mighty salmon and was a little flurried by his responsibilities. As the notes before us describe the picture: 'Breathless the speaker utters his warning and stimulating counsel to the captor of this wily monster, and both the men are rapt, the one beginning to lose his head lest he should lose his fish, the other trembling lest he should become a spectator of defeat.' Of the fate of the third party there is no record.
It was upon this work our painter's reputation was very honourably founded. It was the first of the monastic subjects, and had for its complements: 'Tis always the largest Fish that's lost,' of 1881; 'Friday,' etched in The Art Journal, 1885, or the sorrows of fast days, with the resentful regret of a disappointed angler, 1882, now in the Liverpool Gallery; Recreation,' jolly monks playing at Blind Man's Buff, 1883; Thursday,' which is in the Tate Gallery, and etched in The Art Journal in 1888, and represents some monks, mindful of tomorrow's fast, fishing in a rapid stream, 1880; ‘A Visit from Brother Dominic,' 1881; ‘Brother Francis, the Monastery Cellarman,' 1880; ‘Brother Ambrose, the Monastery Gardener’, 1880; 'A Stranger in the Monastery’, 1883; and 'A Good Story,' in which a travelled friar relates a laughable anecdote to a high dignitary of the Church; ‘Habet!' triumphant fishers from a convent rejoicing in a capture, was the latest of that category of monks fishing which is here referred to, but by no means, as we shall soon discover, the latest of our artist's piscatory subjects. When we consider that ‘Steady! Brother; steady!’ was the work of a youth of twenty-one years of age, who had already exhibited six pictures in public galleries, two of them being at Burlington House, it is easy to imagine how rapid the painter's progress had been.
As time went on we find the artist devoting more and more attention, energy, and skill to secondary parts of his compositions, besides the landscapes, and including interiors of extraordinary richness of character and opulent in accessories of furniture, bric-à-brac, and what-not, all of which are in keeping with the themes of the pictures. The results of this extreme care, and the research it implies, are manifest in our blocks, which reproduce treasuries of details and include the shapes of the wine-glasses, decanters, cupboards, and wine-coolers in Darby and Joan,' 'Tis Fifty Years Since,' and ‘Returning Thanks’, as well as such extreme minutia as the pattern of the bandana handkerchief (veritably Indian as it is) on the knee of a guest on our left of the last-named group of feasters, and the portraits of Darby and his Joan when they were (it was about 1760) young enough to sit to Mr. Gainsborough at his fine house in Pall Mall. Ever pathetic, the ideas of Mr. Dendy Sadler recall by such means as these the days when Darby was a young bridegroom and Joan a fair and blooming bride. There are sympathetic touches, too, of the subtler sort in making the likeness of the young lover look tenderly and ardently towards the portrait of his charming mistress. She, all compact of happiness, and hardly conscious of her charms, looks down because he gazes at her. The very dog leaping at her knee is significant of their faithful and happy loves, while the still blossoming winter of their lives is aptly alluded to by the chrysanthemums piled in a silver vase upon the table.
Except the veracity and aptitude of the expressions and attitudes of all his figures and the appropriateness of their actions to which we shall come presently, no elements of Mr. Dendy Sadler's pictures are more interesting, quaint, and fresh than such details as the above. They are important, too, with regard to his system of painting, and, as concerns his technique, that is, his handling and remarkably accurate views as to finish, which are quite characteristic and original, they may be said to rule. Accordingly, as only a precise, crisp, and very firm touch, brilliant and searching handling and the utmost attention to the effect of light, could succeed in treating multitudinous details of the kind in question, it speaks for itself that our artist must needs work with touches, handling, and light rendering of an exacting and exact kind.
Not a picture of his painting but affirms thus much, from the modelling of the foliage in his background of ‘A Doubtful Bottle,' which is our headpiece, and including the lustre of the glass and silver equipage on the table in 'Darby and Joan,' the some-what worn and faded state of the old-fashioned Brussels carpet on the floor in that work; the reflections of the room and its appurtenances in the convex mirror in ‘Over the Nuts and Wine,' and the extraordinary crispness of the fast-fading hydrangeas in those big tubs which are conspicuous in ‘A Doubtful Bottl’e. So stringent and self-exacting is the art of Mr. Dendy Sadler in regard to these technical qualities that his productions often suffer through his unrelenting methods, and his exactitude tends to become metallic while his unflinching concern for details such as the above gives to his works some excess of hardness, and goes far to reduce their homogeneity as well as to weaken that unity of their colours and tones which is essential to good chiaroscuro, so much prized by artists. As examples of that superfluous stringency to which we refer, the student may, if he has the picture in view, notice the over-definition of the stripes of the wallpaper and the partial obtrusiveness of the black frame behind the lady's head' in 'Tis Fifty Years Since.'
With regard to the excess in question, and its results on the breadth and simplicity of his pictures generally, it is right to say that the large collection of those which are now on view in Mr. Lefèvre's gallery proves that time by reducing their higher keys of light and colour, is actually harmonizing the works, and, by thus massing their tones and tints, improving their chiaroscuro.
Having thus, so far as his choice of their subjects is concerned, referred to Mr. Sadler's piscatorial comedies, an important section of his artistic 'output' which is not represented in the blocks attached to this essay; and, in general terms, described his methods of painting, his technical aims and their characteristic successes as well as that which seems to be their only shortcoming which is worth considering, the reader's attention may now be asked for the pictures which the blocks before him represent. These subjects belong to those categories of Mr. Sadler's productions which followed the piscatorial group, which is indeed almost a regular sequence. The second group may be described as the jovial one; the third as the pathetic one.
Of late years the painter, so ample and diversified are his resources, has entered upon a fourth and humorous sequence of subjects which chiefly deal with the follies and weaknesses 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 satirist who, not unkindly, has held before them that mirror of humour in which they may ‘see themselves as others see them.'
Our present limits forbid more than the names of the leading examples of that new category which is now referred to; these include ‘The Widow's Birthday,' R.A., 1889; ‘The Widow at Home,' 1890; 'Where the Widow Lives'; 'Scandal and Tea,' 1892; 'The New Will’, 1893; ‘A Meeting of Creditors'; 'A Breach of Promise,' ‘a capital instance’; and, lastly, ‘the un-Galleries’. The artist's contributions to the current Academy, ‘London to York,' which shows how travellers by coach halted at country inns. It is now in the King Street belong, one of them to the jovial sequence, the other to that which is pathetic. They need not delay us now. The earliest of the jovial series is the ‘Old and Crusted,' of 1888. Here three 'old boys' are seated in the garden of a country inn, trim, sunlit and glowing with old-fashioned flowers, while their host, himself an antiquity, brings to them, with a delightfully reverential air, a magnum of wonderful port, which, to use the phrase of the late Laureate's 'Will Waterproof,' was then 'As old as Waterloo,' and deserves the honours due and paid to it. The reader will notice that the very dog is not only old and rather lazy, but of an old-fashioned breed; the glasses on the table belong to his younger days, and so do the very flowers that bloom in the garden.
The sequel to this picture is 'A Doubtful Bottle,' which, painted in 1891, gives with infinite humour the reception of that questionable wine by three cognoscenti, two of whom follow the manifest opinion of their leader, who, holding the wine to the light, is ready to condemn anything. The apologetic and protesting vintner in his shirt-sleeves is a first-rate instance of the painter's insight and sense of fun. The garden and house are charming, apt, and quite historical.
To ‘Darby and Joan’, painted in 1889, the reader has been already referred as one of the most tender of the artist's pathetic and anecdotic designs. The companion, though not the sequence to this picture, is the still more pathetic 'Tis Fifty Years since' (R.A., 1894), the most tender of all Mr. Sadler's sardonic pictures in which a second Darby gallantly offers his arm to a second Joan, a somewhat infirm old lady, as witness the crutch-stick on which she leans while rising to accept her spouse's courtesy. Her grateful looks, brimming with the kindly memories of half a century's love, are of Mr. Sadler's best. Notice her gown of old brocade-assumed, of course, in honour of this the golden anniversary of her wedding, her peculiar cap and its lappels of invaluable lace. The aged butler waits in an inner room, ready to attend at the repast which is to celebrate the anniversary here so sympathetically illustrated.
Another very pathetic picture, having for its subject an incident of 'Love that never found its earthly close,' is 'The Sweethearts' (R.A., 1892), where we have, in a shadowy garden-part of Penshurst Place, in Kent-two ancient lovers, not as yet nor ever to be wed, seated vis-à-vis, with a weather-beaten sundial between them, which stands in the path and a point of the subtlest sympathy - is, like the pair, deserted by the almost sunken sun, whose latest beams linger, so to say, for a moment upon the old lady's form, and upon the crest only of the gnomon of that dial which declares that 'the day is done,' and silently records its blank 'Nevermore.' In ‘Over the Nuts and Wine' (R.A., 1889), it is only needful to point to the fan of the lady of the house, fallen to the floor when she left 'the gentlemen to their wine'; to the half-empty decanter, the Gainsborough upon the wall, the Chippendale chairs and the convex mirror and its hovering eagle. The story-telling old 'beau,' withered and be-wigged, belonged to the Regency. The champagne glasses are empty, but there is port in the other glasses. ‘Returning Thanks' (1892) tells its own story so successfully we see at once the speaker, who is 'on his legs,' is a bachelor; that the farthest guest on our right is really deafer than he chooses to admit; that his younger neighbour, who plays with a fruit-knife, is a little bored by the speech, as, indeed, though less obviously, are some of his companions.
F. G. Stephens.”
Obituaries
Manchester Evening News
“Death of a Well-known Artist. Mr. Walter Dendy Sadler, the well-known artist, died shortly after ten o'clock this morning at Hemingford Grey, near St. Ives, Hunts. Mr. Sadler was 69 years of age last May, and had exhibited at the Royal Academy for 50 years past.
Mr. Sadler was outstanding as a humorous and satirical painter, but his humour was quiet and his satire did not greatly sting. His art favoured old settings, whether the scene was a river, monastery, or domestic peace, and always his figures were garbed to indicate distance of time. The Manchester Art Gallery's one picture of his ' In the Camp of the Amalekites ' illustrates this. The period is that of the Roundheads and Royalists.
Mr. Sadler's two chief hobbies were monastic life and angling. They played a part in his pictures, and the Sub-Prior of the Capucine Monastery at Crawley, in Sussex, on one occasion paid him this compliment about his studies of the Order: 'I know your pictures well,' he said to Mr. Sadler, 'and, whilst showing up the amusing side of the monk's life, you never hold them up to ridicule.'
His love of angling early displayed itself. In his school days, he says, a chum and he used to get up at two or three o'clock in the morning, creep downstairs, and escape by the back way to Horsham Park. They explained the fish which was used for breakfast and dinner by stating that the day boys had bought it.
Mr. Sadler was born at Dorking in 1854, and was the son of a solicitor. He studied art at Heatherley's School, and in 1871 was at Dusseldorf under Simmler. He began to exhibit in the Dudley Gallery in 1872 and at the Academy in 1873.”
Leicester Mercury
“Walter Dendy Sadler's Early Fame. R.A. Exhibitor At 19. Mr. Dendy Sadler, the eminent artist, died this morning at Hemingford Grey, Hunts, aged 69. He had been ill for several months. Walter Dendy Sadler was a Surrey man, born at Dorking in 1854, the son of a solicitor of Horsham. From his childhood, he evinced a bent for art, and turning his back on his father's profession, he went to London, where he acquired the rudiments of painting and drawing. He visited the studios of Germany, and for a time lived in Dusseldorf. Even in his youth, he exhibited at the Royal Academy, his first picture being hung at the age of 19. His works include 'The Widow's Birthday,' 'The New Will,' 'London to York,' 'End of the Skein,' 'Toddy at the Cheshire Cheese,' and 'For Weal and Woe.' Apart from his brush, he sought recreation and inspiration as a follower of Isaac Walton.”
The Halifax Daily Courier & Guardian
“A Painter of Domesticated Humour. Mr. W. Dendy Sadler, the eminent artist, died this morning at Hemingford Grey (Hunts.), aged 69. He had been ill several months.
During his boyhood, it was always his ambition to be an artist, and after taking advice, his people at last gave way, and at 16 years of age, he commenced his studies in London and at 17 went to Dusseldorf for six years to continue them. When still a student and only 21, he painted there the first of that series of monastic-life pictures that was to form the base of a very great reputation.
Mr. Sadler was a painter of humour, and of humour, as it were, domesticated - the humour of well-conditioned family life, of middle-class people who Lave leisure and money and beautiful homes, who can afford to give dinners, at which the butler, from his favourite bin, procures the cellar's best, and where the mahogany reflects masters who hunt and shoot and fish, and make money, and make love, and make merry, and make jokes. He blended the interest of story and sentiment with that of line and colour. He painted the bachelor, the spinster, and the widow, seeing both the pathos and the attractiveness of their several conditions, depicting each at rare moments of sly amorousness, as well as in their more everyday mood's of ease and solitude, and never without some kindly hit at the weaknesses of human nature.
His canvases are crowded with those incidents which appeal to us instantly as understandable, and this without reference to the catalogue, so often a stumbling - block to a picture's enjoyment: He dealt with men and women who find life to be a cheery entertainment, men with whom the pipe and bottle and the good things of the table play important, yet not over-important, parts. It was the weakness rather than the strength of human nature which appealed to him, but his slightly satirical outlook was entirely without venom or aught that could wound or offend.
His humour was never warped, nor was it fantastic, but he had the gift of seeing the little foibles and tastes of people and an infallible sense of how to place them on record. His pictures are rarely ends in themselves, but are rather the means by which we reach either backwards or forwards to their subject's further experiences. Special tact appeared to guide him in choice of those subjects which will admit of such collaboration. As cases in point we may take 'The Time-honoured Guest,' the scenes from lawyers' chambers, 'A Breach of Promise,' 'The New Will,' and 'A Little Mortgage,' and each of those scenes that deal with the coquetries, the pleasures and the pathos of old age.”
The Evening News
“Mr. W. Dendy Sadler, the famous artist, died early today at his residence, Hemingford Grey, near St. Ives, Hunts.
Dendy Sadler, who was a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy from 1873 until 1914, writes the art critic of The Evening News was one of the idols of the Victorian public, for whose taste he catered with conspicuous success by his carefully-wrought story pictures of life in Georgian England. His pictures had a cheerful spirit and a mixture of humorous charactisation and sentimentality - which made them a centre of attraction on the walls of Burlington House at a time when the subject of a painting was considered of far greater importance than its abstract æsthetic qualities.
Within his limitations - which were the limitations of the general taste of this period - he was a thoroughly sound craftsman, whose drawing was never at fault, while he managed to keep all dinginess and heavy bituminous shadows from his palette. Most of his pictures were reproduced on a large scale in photogravure plates, the wide distribution of which added considerably to his popularity. The titles of this pictures 'Darby and Joan,' The Widow's Birthday,' 'Toddy at the Cheshire Cheese,' and 'For Weal or Woe' sufficiently indicate the subjects to which he devoted his talent.”
The Daily Mirror
“Man Who Exhibited at the Academy for Fifty Years.Mr. Walter Dendy Sadler, the artist, who has exhibited at the Royal Academy for fifty years, died at Hemingford Grey, near St. Ives (Hunts), yesterday at the age of sixty-nine. Mr. Sadler showed an aptitude for drawing at a very early age. Once, when his schoolmaster told him to bring up his books for examination, he found them full of caricatures of himself, the boys, ships and soldiers.
When he left school Mr. W. D. Sadler, for a few months, tried to work in an office, but he spent most of the time scribbling on his blotting pad. Eventually, he got his own way and was sent to London to study art. Afterwards, he went to Dusseldorf.”
Surrey Mirror & County Post
“Born at Dorking 69 years ago, Mr. Walter Dendy Sadler, the well-known artist, has passed away at his home, Hemingford Grey, near St. Ives. He was the fifth son of Mr. John Dendy Sadler, a solicitor, who lived at Shrub House, now Mr. Moorhouse's photography studio. Here, the subject of this notice was born.
Mr. Dendy Sadler was perhaps the most popular contemporary painter of genre subjects. He was a very careful worker and took infinite pains in choosing correct types, costumes and models. His pictures have been frequently engraved, and probably more reproductions of them hang on the walls of sportsmen than of the works of any other artist of modern times. From a very early age, he manifested a decided bent towards art, and when only 12 years of age executed a series of water-colour drawings of yachts to hang in the saloon of a large schooner.
He was sent to London to begin his art training, and worked at Heatherley's for nine or ten months, and in 1871 went to Dusseldorf, where he studied for six years under J. M. Burfield and Wilhelm Simmler. Mr. Dendy Sadler was only 18 when he exhibited 'A Partial Critic' at the Dudley Gallery, in the following year he was 'hung' at Burlington House, and in 1875 'Steady! Brother, Steady,' the first of so many pictures especially dear to the hearts of anglers, was exhibited at the Royal Academy, going far to confirm the artist's reputation as a painter and a humorist.
Mr. Sadler's subjects were greatly diversified, and his homely humour, simple pathos, and careful craftsmanship appealed to a very wide circle. Among some of the better known of his pictures are 'Thursday' (monks fishing for Friday's dinner), 'Habet,' 'Darby and Joan,' 'For Fifty Years,' 'Sweethearts,' 'A Doubtful Bottle,' 'Old and Crusted,' 'The Squire's Song,' ,' 'Home Brewed,' 'A Breach of Promise,' 'Country Clients,' 'The Plaintiff and Defendant.' 'Pegged down Fishing Match,' 'The New Will,' 'The Widow's Birthday,' 'London to York,' 'The End of the Skein,' Dummy Whist,' 'Toddy at the Cheshire Cheese,' 'For Weal or Woe,' and 'Nearly Done'”
Newcastle Daily Chronicle
“An Artist's Models. By the death of Mr. W. Dendy Sadler, the well-known artist, the little village of Hemingford Grey in Huntingdonshire loses its most distinguished inhabitant. Sunny days usually found the venerable artist at his garden gate, contemplating the willow-fringed waters of the sluggish Ouse. Mr. Sadler found many of his models in this picturesque cluster of thatched cottages, and lovers of the jovial monks and fine old English gentlemen he painted so well can see here their living counterparts.”
The Hunts County News
"The world of art has suffered an irretrievable loss in the passing away of Walter Dendy Sadler at his beautiful riverside residence at Hemingford Grey. Sadler, who has exhibited at the Royal Academy for the past 50 years, has made world-famous the tiny, obscure village where he lived so many years by his almost fanatical devotion to local matter for his subjects.
As a painter of Early English, 18th century country life, and monastic subjects, he was without a peer. Showing a great aptitude for drawing at an early age, Sadler's gift would not be kept within bounds. He was only happy when allowed to draw. Leaving school, he tried work in an office but spent most of his time in drawing caricatures of his fellow clerks on his blotting-pad. Office life becoming more and more irksome, he eventually obtained his one desire and was sent to London to study art at the age of 17. Making remarkable progress he had a picture exhibited at the Academy before reaching the age of 20.
Success spurring him on, he left London for Dusseldorf. Here his great gift of portraying monkish lore so vividly and true to life asserted itself in no uncertain way, and, realising its immense possibilities, the young artist set himself to study his subject from every conceivable point of view.
In Hemingford, Sadler possessed a charming Old English country house, nestling directly on the banks of the picturesque Ouse and overlooking acres of delightful meadowland fringed with stately trees. His house and garden, of which anyone might well be proud, were his greatest delights and he never tired of exhibiting their glories. A lily pond, filled with a wonderful collection of white water-lilies, was a proud possession and often figures in his paintings as a background glowing with colour.
Of all his works, Sadler's black and white etchings are perhaps the widest known, but it is as a colourist that this incomparable artist stands out supreme. The extraordinary wealth of colour in his pictures, blended with amazing skill, stamps him instantly as one of the greatest colourists of his age.
His love of detail, too, is a greatly marked feature of his work. Nothing would satisfy him but the exact thing, and that must be the best of its kind obtainable. He has been known to search the country through for some particular costume that he required, caring not what the cost might be so long as the object fitted his purpose. His expenditure in this direction ran into many hundreds of pounds, and as a result he was in possession of one of the finest collections of period costumes in the country, many of which, from an artistic view, are now almost priceless.
Sadler was an earnest, indefatigable worker. Commencing a picture, he would sit at it day after day, paying the minutest attention to detail, often spending hours on one tiny thing, a peculiar shoe buckle, for example, before getting it to his complete satisfaction. This was typical of the man. Only the best of himself was good enough. He was a man somewhat abrupt in speech and manner but with a lovable personality, ever ready to show his delightful art treasures to lovers of them.
Nearly all the old men of the village have been his subjects at one time or another. Dressed in the velvet trappings of Court life, the swaggering dress of the squires, or the sombre habits of the monks, the old men dearly loved to sit to him, entering into the spirit of the thing with a heartiness delightful to see. On completion of a picture, he would show it to them, and the old men's delight in seeing themselves so faithfully drawn knew no bounds. Artist and subjects worked together in the close and amiable bonds of friendship. This was one of the secrets of Sadler's great success, why his characters are so essentially human.
One of the best-known of his pictures is 'Tomorrow will be Friday,' a strikingly arresting subject featuring several old monks, in the happiest of moods, fishing on the banks of the Ouse. 'Darby and Joan, 'The Squire's Song,' and 'The Popular Candidate' are further examples of his inimitable art. His output of pictures was enormous, the greater portion of which, during the last few years, has gone to America, where his work is in increasing demand.
In all his works, small and great, there is a spirit of jollity and cheer which infects one with his own bright outlook on life. He painted as he lived, and we who are left to appreciate his art will see, mirrored in his pictures, the mind of a great man, who did his utmost to give to the world a sense of real, clean humour. Need more be said? M. E. G. Н.”
The Evening News
“A Painter Of History. Mr Walter Dendy Sadler is dead. If I were in Chelsea and in company with the clever young men who paint those clever young pictures, I might not dare to talk of the art of Mr. Dendy Sadler. But a simple journalist may be allowed to write a word of farewell to a painter who had an honest and a very notable fame among simple people.
I take it that no painter of his time was better known to those who are no haunters of the Bond Street galleries, who cannot tell a Romney from a Gainsborough and have never heard a word spoken of the Early Umbrian School. For wherever there was a shop window with prints in it, there was the work of Mr. Dendy Sadier.
We are not as the Dutchmen were in the seventeenth century: we are not a nation of picture buyers. I take it that millions of householders have bought pictures but once in their lives, and that was when they furnished their semi-detached homes. They bought the chairs and the tables and the beds: they bought the hatstand and the kitchen gear. Then they bought vases for the drawing-room chimney-piece shelf and pictures to hang up on the walls: for these things, like the hatstand, are of respectable custom. It was then that they carried home the prints of Mr. Dendy Sadler's pictures. I praise their choice. Chelsea seems so far away that I will call these very good pictures.
I have the habit of walking about my room, looking at my prints. A picture that, as you may say, tells you a story, would be telling me that story half a dozen times a day, and I could not abide it. Mr. Dendy Sadler's pictures tell stories. Gentle stories of old-fashioned folk, gently told, but yet stories. It is my belief that most people do not look often at those pictures that they bought for custom's sake. I can imagine that these, when they look at a Dendy Sadler, should have much pleasure in it. I had that pleasure when I saw them in the print-seller's window. If a man tells me that they do not please him at all, he must be a very superior person or very dull.
For the story was beautifully told. If you call them 'costume pieces', I will say that costume, the fashion of old times, should be entertainment for anybody with a pinch of imagination in him. Only a very stupid fellow can pass an old house without looking up. Then how should we pass a picture of Mr. Sadler, which is a faithful picture of that old house's dining room with our great-grandmothers at their teatable, or of the dining room with our great-grandfathers sitting over their wine?
This was a well-learned painter. He had much curious knowledge of that age, which seems to us so placid an age, which was just before the railway made a black line on the map. Other painters had painted knights in armour doing knightly things: very few of their pictures were done to the satisfaction of the antiquary. I am myself something of an antiquary: most history pictures make me as cross as the Editor of the
Tailor and Cutter is cross when he counts the buttons in the Prime Minister's Academy portrait and finds that they are in number more than the buttonholes. But you might trust Mr. Sadler in the matter of the tie of your great-grandfather's cravat: he was a faithful painter of chair legs and fireirons and needlework screens.
Genius takes pains. It is certain that Mr. Sadler took pains: I have known very clever young men who do not paint so well as Mr. Sadler. What he painted was authentic history. When I have my way with the nation's school, their walls will be covered with pictures and I think that some of Mr. Dendy Sadler's pictures should be there. They teach: they show you how there was beauty and dignity in the life of that somewhat prim generation of men who wore the first top-hats, the very tall top-hats.
Yet I could wish that Mr. Sadler had done other work. A Man like that should not have spent all his pains in recalling the past. He ought to have painted as Hogarth did, the life of his own generation. What documents that careful hand might have left us. He was a master painter in 1880, which was a year of change. If I knew that the print-seller had a Dendy Sadler print in his window, showing a suburban tea party of 1880, I should go that way home. How pleasant it would be to see those odd figures of the men and women of 1880, faithfully painted as Mr. Dendy Sadler would have painted them! The original canvas should be bought for the nation and set beside Frith's Derby Day, which also is history and a most entertaining picture, although one must not say that to the clever young men.”
