The Model "British Matron": Mr. H-rsl-y, R.A. (as the M.B. Matron, "Oh dear! Oh dear! Who could ha' sat for that?")

Edward Linley Sambourne (1844-1910)

Wood engraving

Punch (24 October 1885): 195

This comments on the outcry, earlier that year, following J. C. Horsley's letter to the Times objecting to nudity in art. Horsley had written his letter under the name of "A British Matron." Although he was by all accounts a genial man, Horsley apparently looked rather stern, so Sambourne's cartoon would have struck contemporaries as particularly ludicrous. A very religious man, he is shown clasping a book of Isaac Watts's hymns.