Lot 133: William Edward Millner , 1849-1895 the postman oil on canvas

oil on canvas

measurements note 40 by 30.5 cm.; 15 ¾ by 12 in.

Christie's, London, 2 February 1979, lot 190;
Roy Miles, London, where bought by Sir David Scott for £1,800

This is presumably a scene set in Millner's native town of Gainsborough in Lincolnshire. Although treated with a certain naivety, the observation of the figure's clothes and the bag in which he carries the letters to be delivered, as well as the wooden cased pump and hinged box upon which stands a pottery bottle, is extraordinary.

Although the postal service has its origins in the seventeenth century, it was not until 1840 and the advent of the Penny Post that the sending of mail was made affordable for almost everyone. The cost was limited to one penny per letter, regardless of the distance it was to travel, and improvements to transport infrastructures made the possibility of sending mail much easier and quicker. The best-known stamps of this early period are the Penny Black and the Mulready, a pre paid envelope, also became popular around this time. By the mid-1840s the last of the horse-drawn mail coaches were replaced by rail delivery from London, although in rural areas the post was still transported by coaches. In the mid-1850s the novelist and Postmaster Anthony Trollope devised a scheme for placing post-boxes around the country for people to deposit their letters for collection, and with improvements to the services no longer requiring customers to purchase stamps on the day they were to be posted, it was possible for letters to be sent without visiting post offices. Later in the same decade, Rowland Hill proposed a system of dividing London into a series of ten distinct postal districts and invented the first postal codes.