Married

Sadler specialised in genre painting, usually costume pieces set in the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries with humorous or sentimental themes. The body language in Married, the symbolic elements such as the blocked garden entrance behind the couple and the tortoise who is lumbering away to hibernate, all suggest that the initial warmth of love has waned on the husband's part. Contemporary Victorian tenets dictated that the young wife remain the 'angel of the hearth', even if the coals of love no longer burned as strongly.

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