Sandby, Paul

Sandby, Paul (bapt. Nottingham, 12 Jan. 1731; d London, 7 Nov. 1809).
English topographical watercolourist and printmaker. Like his brother Thomas (bapt. Nottingham, 8 Dec. 1721; d Windsor, 25 June 1798) before him, he trained as a military draughtsman at the Tower of London. Both brothers saw service in Scotland, Thomas during the 1745–6 Jacobite rebellion, and Paul after it, when he worked on a survey of the Highlands as part of the government campaign to subdue the area. In about 1752 Paul returned to London, where he lived for a time with his brother. He also spent time with him at Windsor Great Park, where Thomas had held the position of deputy ranger since 1746 (they produced many views of Windsor and its environs, and the Royal Library at Windsor Castle has an outstanding Sandby collection). Thomas also worked as an architect and landscape gardener, his most important project at Windsor being the creation of Virginia Water, the largest artificial lake in the country (he earned the unfortunate nickname ‘Tommy Sandbag’ after a dam he constructed burst in a storm in 1768). The brothers have much in common as watercolourists, but Paul was the better artist and also more versatile, his output including lively figure compositions as well as an extensive range of landscape subjects. In his later work he often used body-colour (he also sometimes painted in oils) and he was the first professional artist in England to publish aquatints (1775). Gainsborough singled him out as the only contemporary English landscape artist who painted ‘real views from nature’ instead of artificial Picturesque compositions and he helped to win prestige for the medium of watercolour. Both brothers were founder members of the Royal Academy in 1768 and Thomas was its first professor of architecture.