Painting named "Thursday" showing monks fishing, painted by Walter Dendy Sadler (1854-1923), [s.d.]

Photograph of a painting named "Thursday" showing monks fishing, painted by Walter Dendy Sadler (1854-1923), [s.d.]. Several monks watch in awe as one of the monks reel in a fish. Another monk, holding a net, kneels near the lake ready to catch the fish. More monks are seen around the lake, lounging, reading a book or walking. All the monks are wearing traditional monk robes with hoods and a rope-like belt around their waste. The arcades and towers of a Spanish-like building (possibly a mission) is visible in the background.; "Walter Dendy Sadler (1854-1923) was born in Dorking, England and brought up in Horsham, England, where he showed a precocious talent for drawing. At age 16 he decided to become a painter and enrolled for two years at Heatherly's School of Art in London, subsequently studying in Germany under W. Simmler. He exhibited at the Dudley Gallery from 1872 and at the Royal Academy from the following year through to the 1890s. He painted contemporary people in domestic and daily life pursuits, showing them with comical expressions illustrating their greed, stupidity etc. Dendy Sadler was best known for his pictures of monks - his reputation was established with a picture of monks fishing called 'Steady Brother, Steady' (1875), and his most well-known paintings are 'Thursday' (Tate Gallery, and incidentally one of the first three pictures in Henry Tate's collection) also showing monks fishing, and 'Friday' (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), where they are consuming their catch the next day. The monks are characterized as good-natured but foolish looking fellows." -- unknown author (part 1 of 2).; "The combination of realism with whimsicality follows an English tradition of almost slapstick humor, which seems to work better as black and white illustration in the pages of 'Punch' or in light-hearted articles by artists such as Harry Furniss. Another slightly whimsical picture is 'End of the Skein' at the Lady Lever Art Gallery. Perhaps more to modern taste are Sadler's less blatant pictures, as in 'For Fifty Years' (1894), showing an old gentleman happily offering his arm to his blank-faced bored wife - for him 50 years of domestic bliss, for her half a century of increasing dullness. In pictures like this, or 'An Offer of Marriage' of 1895, Sadler also gives some of the best studies of Victorian interiors. He was criticized for this background detail, as it detracted from the subjects of his pictures, but it seems fair to me for a whimsical painting to provide encouragement for the eye to wander around the scene rather than being pushed too hard towards the 'point'." -- unknown author (part 2 of 2).