
Oliver Cornish
Sale Coordinator for Furniture, Sculpture, Rugs & Tapestries
This auction has ended. View lot details



Sold for £3,328 inc. premium
Our Home and Interiors specialists can help you find a similar item at an auction or via a private sale.
Find your local specialist
Sale Coordinator for Furniture, Sculpture, Rugs & Tapestries

Senior Cataloguer

Associate Specialist
Provenance
Anon. sale, Christie's, London, 11 March 2008, lot 410.
Anon. sale, Christie's, London, 5 June 2013, lot 53.
Private collection, UK.
Charles Cooper Henderson developed a deep interest in road travel during his Grand Tour of Europe in the 1820s. Following his 1829 marriage to Charlotte By, the daughter of a Thames lighterman, and the subsequent withdrawal of financial support by his father, Henderson pursued a professional career in art. A connoisseur of coaches and carriages, he depicted an era when skilled coach driving conferred considerable social prestige, comparable to the status of high-performance car driving today.
The mail coach system, introduced in 1784 to replace the vulnerable post boys, became a symbol of speed and national efficiency by the early nineteenth century. These vehicles bore a distinctive maroon and black livery, adorned with the Royal Arms and the insignia of the Orders of Knighthood. Prior to the introduction of the penny post in 1840, postal services were expensive and largely limited to the affluent. At their peak, Royal Mail coaches could reach speeds of twelve miles per hour, with teams of horses changed in under two minutes. Their punctuality was such that villagers could set their clocks by the mail's arrival, and letters were often thrown from moving coaches.
Henderson's works capture these details with remarkable precision, evoking the movement and dust of the open road. His paintings combine technical accuracy with romantic sensibility, vividly portraying the vitality of coaching culture on the eve of its decline with the advent of the railways.