In 1783 King George III hosted a dinner at Windsor Castle where the table itself became the centrepiece: beneath the glass surface, a Bavarian confectioner named Benjamin Zobel had arranged an intricate display of coloured sands, sugar and marble dust, ephemeral decoration so admired by the King that he urged Zobel to find a way of making such pictures permanent. Zobel obliged, developing a technique using coloured sand fixed with glue to wood or pasteboard, a craft now known as marmotinto, and is credited as the first artist to introduce this form of sand painting to England, drawing loosely on the older Japanese art of bonseki, or tray painting.
Born in Memmingen, Bavaria, in 1762, the son of a master pastry chef, Zobel learned the family trade before leaving Germany, spending two years in Amsterdam studying miniature painting, and eventually settling in London, where he worked for the Ecchard Brothers of Chelsea designing patterned wallpapers, linens and silks before entering royal service as a "Table Decker" at Windsor, responsible for the elaborate sugar and sand decorations traditional at royal banquets. Following his sand-painting breakthrough, Zobel's work found continued favour within the royal household, including the patronage of the Duke of York, and he developed a particular fascination with animal subjects, horses, sheep and pigs above all, often basing his compositions on paintings by his close friend George Morland, a leading figure of the so-called Isle of Wight School. Examples of Zobel's sand pictures survive today in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Memmingen city museum in his native Germany, and Dundurn Castle in Ontario, Canada. He died in London in 1830.
The painting by Zobel held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, of carters resting on a wooded track, reflects the artist's engagement with rural and animal subject matter that ran alongside his celebrated sand-painting practice, connecting a genuinely inventive craftsman-turned-artist, whose royal patronage began at a dinner table, to the gallery's wider holdings of Georgian British painting.