Despite George Scharf’s professional success and eventual social status, most people who have heard the name are thinking of his father. It is George Scharf Sr’s urban sketches– tracking street by street and demolished house by demolished house the emergence of Regency London and of the city we know today–that were brought together in the 1980s as an exhibition and a book, both entitled George Scharf’s London. If George Jr does not get to possess, in the contemporary imagination, the city in which he, too, lived and worked, he did in his own time manage to surpass his father in reputation and class, to leave behind the slightly pathetic figure, the chronically underemployed immigrant debtor who shared– that is to say, anticipated– his name. The remarkable story of George Jr’s class and professional ascendancy, marked by increasing signs of public respect, achieved its apotheosis in the nominal change that shortly preceded his death: the not-quite- posthumous creation of ‘Sir George Scharf’, the addition of ‘Sir’ to the name of the son, marked the distance between the two men for posterity.
