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Paul Sandby Career Portfolio

Paul Sandby worked in many media: watercolour, gouache, and oils, but it was his aquatints that had a lasting influence on the development of British landscape art.

The aquatint¹ was invented in France. The aquatint is a print, but without the lined effect typical of eighteenth century engravings. Sandby developed the process of making aquatints so that he could recreate in a print the look of a watercolour with varied tones and delicate patterns. This ability to produce watercolour style prints in his XII Views in North Wales, without the constraints on design and composition of traditional printmaking, made his work very influential. The fluid designs of his aquatints were ideally suited to late 18th century artistic taste. Sandby showed the potential of the aquatint in his best work:

Sandby realistically recreates the rays of sun breaking through the clouds in this aquatint of the Vale of Llangollen.
© Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru - National Library of Wales

Sandby exploits the ability of aquatint to show a variety of tones and contrasts and so captures the atmosphere of the castle at night.
© Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru - National Library of Wales

Sandby sketched at every opportunity whilst on the tour of North Wales. He sketched sites such as Conwy and Caernarfon castles from many different angles. Later, back in the studio he would rework these basic sketches into aquatints and finished paintings. He must have had a wonderful visual memory as he was still creating new works of art based on these sketches from North Wales nearly forty years later.

Art historians have described Sandby as the first artist to fully understand and express the picturesque² in art. You can see his imagination at work in his aquatints heightening mountains, deepening rivers, increasing the size of waterfalls, altering the movements of the sun and shifting the scenery; all to create the perfectly composed landscape.

¹ Sandby's aquatint process involved him painting on a liquid aquatint wash in varying thicknesses on to a metal plate to the design he wanted. The artist would then use acid to burn the design into the plate, the thinner the wash, the more the acid would burn or 'bite' into the plate. The artist would then ink the plate. The deeper the 'bites' the more ink there would be on that area of the plate and so darker tones would appear on the print. It was a skilled and time-consuming process.

² The picturesque was an 18^th century idea about which landscapes were attractive. The picturesque was an appreciation of the old, the irregular and the decayed in the landscape, for instance a ruined castle on a hill, old farm buildings, and gnarled and ancient oak trees.

Paul Sandby, Career Portfolio

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Related links
	Introduction
	The Artist
	The Patron
	Paul Sandby Career Portfolio
	Art & Ideas 1700-1800
	Touring North Wales
	Touring North Wales Continued
	Wrexham Geritage & Culture