Paul Sandby, R.A.

With Spink-Leger, London, Master Drawings, 17^th to 20^th Century, 1998, no. 21,

where acquired by Diane A. Nixon

Paul Sandby was a founding member of the Royal Academy and is considered one of the pioneers of the British watercolor school. Like his elder brother, Thomas (1721-1798), who was appointed Deputy Ranger of Windsor Great Park in 1746, Sandby lived at Windsor for almost thirty years (between 1752 and circa 1780-2) before moving with his wife, Anne, to Westminster in London.

Judging by the costumes of the sitters, the present drawing dates to circa 1785-90 and it may well show a landscape within the Great Park itself. The sitters have traditionally been identified as members of the Sandby family, with the most likely candidate for the elegantly dressed lady being Harriot, who married the artist’s second son, Thomas Paul (d. 1832), in 1786. The couple went on to have a large family, with many of the children being born at Windsor.¹

Although celebrated for his work as a landscape painter, Paul Sandby also enjoyed recording the people that surrounded him; be it the guardsmen at Windsor, the farmhands or members of his own family. These studies were often created with just pencil and wash and they are generally small in scale. Keeping them carefully in his studio, Sandby was able to refer back to them, if needed, when populating his landscape watercolors. The present work retains much of the informality of these ‘aide-memoire’ studies but Sandby's placement of his subject within a landscape, together with the work’s large scale, perhaps suggests that it was painted as an independent work of art in its own right.

^1.Some sources report that Thomas Paul and Harriett Sandby had thirteen children