Reproductions of Works: “The Earlier English Water-Colour Painters,” by Cosmo Monkhouse; “The English Water-Colour Painters,” by A. J. Finberg; “Early English Water-Colour,” by C. E. Hughes; “Water-Colour,” by the Hon. Neville Lytton; “Water-Colour Painting,” by A. W. Rich; “The Royal Academy” (The Studio Summer Number, 1904); The Studio, Jan. 1918.]
Sandby was one of the most prolific of the earlier topographical artists. His numberless drawings and the engravings he made from them did more than any one man had done before to familiarize Englishmen with the beauties of their native land. He was an indefatigable traveller, and he was the first artist to discover the artistic beauties of Wales.
He worked both in transparent colour and in gouache. His drawings in the latter medium, of which there are several in the V. and A. Museum, are distinctly inferior to his works in pure colour. They are scenic and conventional in design, feeble and pretentious in execution. His drawings in transparent colour, however, are delightfully fresh and vigorous; luminous in effect, and filled with proofs of keen and genial observation. They seem full of air and light, vivid human interest, and in their treatment of architecture and of all natural features they are at once careful, accurate and lucid without ever showing signs of labour or fatigue. In the abundance of his work and its variety Sandby approached nearer to Turner than any other artist. But he had not Turner’s subtlety of eye and hand, nor his exquisite sense of artistic form. His landscapes are well composed, but on conventional lines, and the whole material is never welded together into an original and impeccable design, as with Turner, Cozens, and Cotman.
Sandby’s Welsh aquatints with their many daring effects of light form the real forerunners of Turner’s “Liber Studiorum.” They display better than any single drawing the width and range of the artist’s powers.
As an engraver and water-colour painter Paul Sandby is a genial and inspiriting personality. He transformed topographical draughtsmanship into something new and living, instinct with life and emotion. “And if we may not call him a great artist, we may at least say that he was a topographical draughtsman of genius.”
ALEXANDER COZENS
[Born in Russia, date unknown; son of Peter the Great and an Englishwoman; sent by his father to study painting in Italy; said to have come to England in 1746; drawing-master at Eton School, 1763-1768; married a sister of Robert Edge Pine; elected Fellow of the Society of Artists, 1765; died in Duke Street, Piccadilly, April 23, 1786.
Exhibited: Society of Artists, 1760, ’63, ’65-’71; Free Society, 1761, ’62; Royal Academy, 1772, ’73, ’75, ’77-’79, ’81.
Works in Public Galleries: V. and A. Museum (Water-Colours); British Museum; Manchester Whitworth Institute.
Biographical and Critical Sources: Leslie’s “Handbook for Young Painters”; Redgrave’s “Dictionary”; “Reminiscences of Henry Angelo,” vol. i, 212-216; “D. N. B.”