Sadler, Robert
Robert Sadler was born in Newmarket, Suffolk in 1909. He started drawing and painting from his childhood and after attending Eastbourne College Robert read Mechanical Engineering at Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge. He leant to fly while attending the University Air Squadron he joined the Royal Air Force as a Pilot Officer in 1930. He took part in the action from the beginning of the Second World War in 1939 but was posted the Air Ministry as ‘Director of Plans’ and had his first formal art training at Heatherly’s art school where he developed his skills as an artist in 1942.
Sadler lectured at the Turkish Air Staff College with an undercover mission to prevent Turkey from entering the war and painted there in 1943. He served in the UK later and became as Air Attache to the British Embassy in Copenhagen in 1947 where he enrolled into an art school. In 1950 Robert attended Winchester School of Art when serving as a Vice-President of the RAF Officers’ Selection Board. Sadler was appointed a representative on the NATO Joint Chiefs of Staff Intelligence Committee in the USA where he came across the works of the American Abstract Expressionists and enrolled into the Corcoran School of Art in Washington DC in 1953.
Robert returned to the UK in 1954 to retire from RAF and to devote his life entirely to art from 1955. Over his long career as a full-time painter, he painted over 3,000 mainly abstract paintings influenced by Tachisme or Abstraction Lyrique of Serge Poliakoff (1900-1969) and Nicolas de Staël (1914-1955) and by his British contemporaries namely Peter Lanyon (1918-1964) and Paul Feiler (1918-2013). Many of Sadler’s landscape paintings reveal his unique perception of the surface and its landmarks as if seen from the height of the flying aircraft.
Over his almost 50-years long artistic career he had exhibitions at the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours in 1955, The Royal Institute Galleries in 1955 and 1969, the Royal Institute of Oil Painters in 1955 and 1957, the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition in 1958, the Obelisk Gallery, Washington DC in 1960, the London Group and CEMA, Belfast in 1962, the Royal Institute Gallery in 1969, Tryon Gallery, North Carolina, the USA in 1979, EU Parliament, Strasbourg in 1985 and New English Art Club in 1986 and he had his Annual Studio Exhibition from 1965 to 2001. Robert Sadler was a member of the Winchester Art Society and the Cambridge Society of Painters & Sculptors.
