Paul Sandby (1731-1809) is remembered as "the father of English watercolour" and, with his brother Thomas, was a founder member of the Royal Academy in 1768. Born in Nottingham and baptised there in 1731, he is thought to have learned his early skills as a draughtsman from Thomas, who went on to become a prominent architect. This training equipped him to join the military drawing department at the Tower of London, and in 1747 he was appointed chief draughtsman to the Military Survey of Scotland, established in the wake of the 1745 Jacobite uprising. Based in Edinburgh for some five years, Sandby produced detailed topographical maps for the army while also making numerous watercolours of the Scottish landscape, and taught the young Robert Adam to draw.
Following his return south, Sandby spent time at Windsor with his brother Thomas, who had been appointed Deputy Ranger of Windsor Great Park, and there he made an extensive series of drawings of the castle, town and surrounding countryside. He settled permanently in London by 1760, exhibiting with the Society of Artists before defecting to the newly founded Royal Academy in 1768, one of twenty-eight founder members nominated by George III. He served for many years as chief drawing master at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, a post he held until 1799, and through this teaching, as much as through his own exhibited work, exerted a lasting influence on the development of the English watercolour school. Gainsborough singled him out as the only contemporary English landscape painter working from "real views from nature" rather than artificial picturesque invention, and Sandby was also a technical pioneer, becoming the first professional artist in England to publish aquatints, a printing technique he named and did much to popularise for its particular suitability in reproducing the tonal qualities of watercolour. He exhibited at the Royal Academy in almost every year between 1769 and his death in 1809, latterly supported by an Academy pension in his more difficult final years.
John Mitchell Fine Paintings' holdings of Paul Sandby span some of the range for which he remains celebrated: country house and estate views, castle and bridge subjects, and rural genre scenes with figures, executed with the combination of topographical precision and painterly assurance that distinguished his work from that of many contemporaries working in watercolour and gouache. As a founding figure of both the Royal Academy and the English watercolour tradition itself, Sandby occupies a position of particular importance among the gallery's holdings of eighteenth-century British landscape painting.