Paul Sandby, R.A.

With Walker's Galleries, London, by 1955;
by whom sold to the grandfather of the present owner

Possibly, London, Royal Academy, 1775, no. 275

This work is impressive and on a large scale. Whereas many of the pigments have survived wholly intact, the blue of the sky has softened and in parts discoloured. The work has been laid down onto non-acidic Museum board.
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Professor Herrmann has suggested that the present work was drawn in the middle of 1770s, a decade in which Sandby made three trail-blazing tours of Wales. His first recorded visit was in the summer of 1770, when he stayed at Wynnstay in North Wales, as a guest of his patron and pupil Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn, Bt.. The following year, he was invited back to Wynnstay and the pair carried out a two-week tour of the Williams-Wynn estates. Sandby returned once again to Wales in 1773, this time in the company of the explorer Sir Joseph Banks, the naturalist John Lightfoot, the botanist Dr Solander and possibly the Hon. Charles Greville, brother of the 2^nd Earl of Warwick (see lot 214).  The experiences of these visits which, according to Sandby’s son, he remembered with the ‘fondest delight,’¹ provided the inspiration for four important published series of aquatints, namely: Views in South Wales (1775), Views in North Wales (1776), Views of Wales (1777) and Twelve Views of North and South Wales (1786). The present work was not a composition that Sandby chose to engrave, but it may have been the work that he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1775. We would like to thank Professor Herrmann for his help when cataloguing this work. 

1. P. Hughes, ‘Paul Sandby’s Tour of Wales with Joseph Banks’, The Burlington Magazine, July 1975, p.455