In a famous letter written in 1764, Thomas Gainsborough declined a commission to paint Lord Hardwicke’s country seat, with the words, “with respect to real Views from Nature in this Country… Paul Sanby [sic] is the only Man of Genius… who has employ’d his Pencil that way”.
The artist he was referring to, Paul Sandby, has been called the father of the topographical tradition in English landscape. Through the views of Britain he painted in the middle years of the 18th century, he probably did more than any other individual to awaken the British people to the natural beauties of their own country.
I sometimes wonder whether Sandby’s career unfolded at the time it did and in the way it did because his pictures fulfilled a psychological need. In the years following the defeat of the Jacobite rebellion in 1745, Britons began to feel a sense of national identity that had not existed before. As a result, perhaps they were curious to see in Sandby’s accurate views what the country they now identified as their own looked like.
Born in Nottingham in 1730, Sandby was the younger brother of the architect, landscape designer and draughtsman Thomas Sandby. The brothers often collaborated on paintings and also shared an interest in science and technology, including a fascination both with perspective and with the camera obscura – a precursor to the modern photographic camera in which external images are received through a lens and projected onto paper. Artists in the 18th century used these box-like devices to outline an image in pencil before filling in colours.
From 1751-71, Sandby travelled through Britain painting country houses and picturesque scenery, often in watercolour, a medium he helped to develop as an independent art form. Among the highlights of a show at the museum at Nottingham Castle, staged to mark the 200th anniversary of Sandby’s death, are a series of panoramic vistas charting the vast extent and breathtaking beauty of great estates in England, Scotland and Wales.
In his 1765 view of the deer park at Windsor, to take just one example, Sandby lays pale, transparent washes of light blue, soft grey and green onto white paper. The delicacy and precision of his touch, together with the subtle tonal modulation, give such views a limpid clarity unmatched by any other watercolourist working in England at this date.
Sandby painted such watercolours for the private enjoyment of the landowners who commissioned them. By contrast, when he produced paintings for public exhibition, he tended to work in “bodycolour” (pigment ground in gum and water, mixed with Chinese white). Here the colours are deeper, stronger and opaque. Contrasts of light and dark are much bolder, just as you’d expect in works of art he wanted to be noticed in the highly competitive viewing conditions that existed at the Society of Artists, and, after 1769, the Royal Academy.
In a series of views of Windsor Castle painted in bodycolour, also painted around 1765, he shows the castle at different times of day, from different viewpoints, and under dramatically different weather conditions. The clear outlines and strong perspective in his two views of the north terrace on a fine spring day are so accurately rendered that it is possible to tell the time of day by the way the shadows fall.
Contrast these with a view of the castle from the river on a moonlit night during an electrical storm, a tour de force of naturalistic observation in which Sandby contrasts the cold, white thread of a lightning bolt ricocheting off the castle’s ramparts with the milky suffusion of moonlight seen through a tumult of swiftly shifting clouds.
A third view shows the castle at night from a distance, illuminated by the glow of a bonfire we can’t actually see. Beautifully painted little figures – a young family strolling on the terrace, an elderly couple walking their dogs, a drunken lout and his long-suffering wife – animate these scenes, just as the figures do in landscapes by Canaletto.
We often think of Sandby solely as a landscape painter, but he was also a superb draughtsman who drew the human figure as well as he did houses and trees. In this show there are a number of works that could almost be classed as genre. One example is an enchanting scene showing the ruins of Roslin Castle in Midlothian painted in bodycolour around 1780. In the foreground the well-known amateur artist Lady Frances Scott is shown sketching from nature, using a portable camera obscura, while her admiring friends and family look on.
As a man of the Enlightenment, Sandby shared his fascination for artificial effects of light with Gainsborough, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, and Joseph Wright of Derby. For example, The Magic Lantern, painted in watercolour and bodycolour in 1753, strikes me as being as much a scientific demonstration as it is a charming genre scene. In it, the artist shows how light or its absence affects our perception of colour. The subject is a family gathered in their darkened drawing room at night to look at images projected through a magic lantern. Sandby contrasts the bright colours of the battle scene being projected onto the far wall with the muted reds and blues of the clothes worn by the spectators sitting in the dark. This interest in science and technology is of a piece with his claim to be the man who, in 1775, introduced the aquatint process of print-making commercially into England.
But the man of the Enlightenment had another side to his character. Sandby was also a caricaturist whose exuberant cruelty sometimes verges on the unhinged. His work in this genre is not well known today for one very good reason: so crazed was he with hatred for his rival William Hogarth and all that Hogarth stood for, that his assaults on his rival’s mind, morals and competence are virtually incomprehensible to anyone unfamiliar with 18th-century art politics.
Even in Sandby’s of watercolours showing the street calls of itinerant London traders, he continues his furious dialogue with Hogarth. To take one example, where Hogarth painted his famous portrait of the Shrimp Girl, he shows a fresh-faced “type” of pure English beauty.
Sandby’s watercolour of a young woman selling mackerel depicts her as a loud-mouthed, low-bred termagant, so aggressive in selling her wares that a house owner refuses to open his door to her. For anyone who knows the Cries of London through the sentimentalised prints which Francis Wheatley published in the 1790s, the brutal realism of Sandby’s version will come as a shocking – and welcome – antidote.
This varied and constantly surprising show will be in Nottingham until October 18, before travelling to the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh (November 7 to February 7 2010), and ending up at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (March 13 to June 13).