Street Sellers in Drury Lane

Entitled 'Street Sellers in Drury Lane' this scene appears to foreground two caricatured figures of fish sellers in the West End. The sellers are coarse and ragged and Henderson may have been influenced by the publication in 1820 of Thomas Rowlandson’s 'Characteristic Sketches of the Lower Orders' in which figures were drawn with great humour and liveliness, sometimes in identifiable locations. The street sellers were a popular subject for artists because of their colourful clothing and the different storylines they portrayed.

By the 1820s street sellers were already considered old fashioned in the quickly expanding capital and were increasingly associated with the poor and itinerant.

The woman seller speaks to a workman while her companion slices a fish. Another figure entering his house looks up to a small statue while coaching prints on the wall indicate the artistic interests of the artist. Henderson is known primarily as a painter of coaching scenes.