Robert Sadler

1960 abstract oil painting by British artist Robert Sadler, in greys

1960

Robert Sadler was born in Newmarket, Suffolk, the son of a racehorse trainer. By the age of fourteen, he was drawing and painting airplanes, horses, houses and landscapes. After studying at Eastbourne College and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, he joined the Royal Air Force in 1930 as a pilot from Cambridge University Air Squadron. In 1942, whilst posted to the Air Ministry as ‘Director of Plans’, he attended art school in London and spent the following year in Turkey on special duties, where he lectured at the Turkish Air Staff College and painted and rode racehorses. At the end of the war, Sadler returned to the United Kingdom and took up the post of Station Commander at RAF Binbrook in Lincolnshire. In 1947, he moved to Denmark as Air Attaché to the British Embassy in Copenhagen, where he attended art school and two years later, whilst Vice-President of the RAF Officers’ Selection Board, set-up a studio in Stockbridge whilst attending art school in Winchester. In 1953, Sadler moved to the USA to take up the post as a representative on the NATO Joint Chiefs of Staff Intelligence Committee, during which period he attended the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., where he first encountered the work of the American Abstract Expressionists. Returning to the UK in 1955, he moved back to Newmarket, having retired from the RAF to devote the rest of his life to painting. Sadler attended Heatherley’s School of Fine Art in London, Cambridge Technical College and became a member of the Winchester Art Society and the Cambridge Society of Painters & Sculptors. Sadler’s first one-man show was at Swaffham Prior, Cambridge and from then until 1963, he lived and painted in a largely abstract expressionist style influenced by the École de Paris (Tachisme) of Poliakoff and de Stael and by the contemporary British work of Peter Lanyon, William Scott, Paul Feiler, Bryan Wynter and Adrian Heath. In 1964, Sadler moved to Aldeburgh, Suffolk and built a new Studio at 39 The Terrace, where he lived till his death in August 2001. Sadler hung an Annual Studio Exhibition almost every year between 1965 and 2001 and since his death, Sadler’s works have been exhibited at various galleries throughout Suffolk. In 2007, a group of twelve of Sadler’s paintings was chosen to furnish the set for the Cornwall based TV series, ‘Echo Beach’. In his foreword to the catalog of Bryan Wynter’s one-man show at the Hayward Gallery in 1976, Alan Bowness wrote, "For a short period – say from 1955–65 – British artists believed they were as good as anyone and objectively speaking, I think this was true – certainly one saw the emergence of a remarkable plethora of new talent and a quantity of good painting and sculpture unmatched before or since." Robert Sadler and the work he created during this decade, perfectly illustrate Bowness’s point and fully deserve to be seen in that same light.