Sandby Conference in London
Paul Sandby and the Geographies of Eighteenth-Century Art
Paul Mellon Centre, London, 18-19 March 2010
Paul Sandby, "Roche Abbey, Yorkshire," c.1770s. Watercolour over graphite, 300 x 588 mm. Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photo © Royal Academy of Arts/Slingsby
This conference, to be held at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, will address issues arising from the exhibition Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain (Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery, 25 July-18 October 2009; National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, 7 November 2009-7 February 2010; Royal Academy of Arts, London, 13 March-13 June 2010). Organised by Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery, this is the first exhibition to bring together drawings, paintings and prints by this important, if neglected, artist, spanning his long career, and from all the major public collections of his works. In addressing Sandby’s vast and versatile body of work, in its figurative as well as topographical aspects, the exhibition explores how the artist portrayed the character of landscape throughout Britain, and indeed contributed to envisioning the country as a nation state from the cementing of the Act of Union with Scotland, after the failure of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, to the wars with revolutionary and Napoleonic France at the century’s end. Through extensive tours, initially as a military draughtsman and then as a professional artist, Sandby pioneered the artistic depiction of landscape in Scotland and Wales, and searched out new sites throughout England. His art is arguably unrivalled among that of his contemporaries in its portrayal of the appearance and meaning of a range of subjects, rural and urban, modern and historical, in a country experiencing rapid social and commercial development.
Thursday 18 March, Royal Academy of Arts
6:30 Private view of the exhibition, Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain, led by John Bonehill (Curator of Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain and Lecturer in Art History, University of Glasgow), followed by a wine reception.
Friday 19 March, The Paul Mellon Centre
9:40 Welcome by Brian Allen (Director of Studies, The Paul Mellon Centre)
9:45 Morning Session introduced and chaired by Kim Sloan (Curator, Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum)
9:50 Keynote address by Bruce Robertson (Professor of Art History, University of California-Santa Barbara), “Paul Sandby: Father of English Watercolour?”
10:30 Timothy Wilcox (Independent Scholar), “‘Burying the Hatchet’: Paul Sandby at Luton Park”
11:40 Finola O’Kane (Lecturer in Architecture, University College Dublin), “’A Genuine Idea of the Face of the Kingdom’? Jonathan Fisher and Paul Sandby’s portrait of Ireland within the frame of Great Britain”
12:20 John Barrell (Professor of English, Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York), “A Common in Wales: Edward Pugh, the Pastoral, and Progress”
2:15 Afternoon session introduced and chaired by Shearer West (Director of Research, Arts and Humanities Research Council)
2:20 Gillian Forrester (Curator of Prints and Drawings, Yale Center for British Art), “‘No Joke Like a True Joke’? ‘Twelve London Cries done from the Life’”
3:00 Nick Grindle (Teaching Fellow, Department of Art History, University College London), “Living in London and Windsor: The Sandby Brothers’ Residences, c.1752-1809”
4:10 Carolyn Anderson (Ph.D. candidate, School of Geography, University of Edinburgh), “’The Art of Depicting with a Soldier’s Eye’: The Military Mapping of Eighteenth-Century Scotland”
4:50 Stephen Daniels (Professor of Cultural Geography, University of Nottingham), “‘Great Balls of Fire’: Representing the Remarkable Meteor of 18th August 1783”
5:30 Panel and audience discussion chaired by Sam Smiles (Emeritus Professor of Art History, University of Plymouth)
6:15 Wine reception
Paul Sandby’s Bicentenary
From the website of the National Gallery of Scotland:
Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain
Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery, 25 July — 18 October 2009
National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, 7 November 2009 — 7 February 2010
Royal Academy of Arts, London, 13 March — 13 June 2010
Paul Sandby, "Windsor Castle from Datchet Lane on a Rejoicing Night," Photograph: The Royal Collection © 2009 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II
Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain looks at all aspects of Sandby’s career and includes studies of rural and urban views, street scenes, royal parks and ancient castles. Sandby explored a broader range of subject matter than any previous artist in Britain and was integral in refining the use of watercolour. This exhibition features over one hundred loans, including oil paintings, watercolours, gouaches, prints and sketchbooks, coming from all the major collections which house his work: The Royal Collection, The British Museum, The British Library, The Victoria and Albert Museum, and The Yale Center for British Art. It also showcases outstanding works from private collections.
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Addressing the exhibition in The Gaurdian (7 November 2009), Linda Colley describes Sandby’s standing in British society, then and now:
Stephen Daniels, et al (London: Royal Academy of Arts), ISBN: 978-1905711482, 216 pages, $55
. . . As George III’s remark illustrates, this view of him has always been coloured by varieties of snobbery. To this extent, the portrait of Sandby by Francis Cotes, showing him leaning out of a country house window, sketchbook in hand, can be seen as a calculated puff by a close friend. It accurately conveys Sandby’s good looks and pleasant temperament. But the portrait gives a flatteringly deceptive impression of a man as much at ease in polite and leisured interiors as he is with nature. In reality, Sandby’s family background was considerably more humble than that of Gainsborough or John Constable. Unlike his fellow academician Joshua Reynolds, Sandby was never a fashionable, expensive portrait painter. Nor was he a practitioner of academically prestigious history painting. And, crucially, unlike JMW Turner or Thomas Girtin, Sandby was not a metropolitan.
The son of a framework knitter, he was baptised in Nottingham in 1731; and this exhibition is very much a Nottingham achievement, where it was first displayed. The show, opening today at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, and at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in March, was conceived by Stephen Daniels of Nottingham University. It is exactly the sort of deeply researched and ambitious regional art exhibition that is likely to be rendered increasingly impracticable because of government, municipal and corporate spending cuts. . . .
Sandby’s vision then is substantially (not entirely) loyalist and conventionally patriotic, and this may be another reason why his work is sometimes passed over. Morning, an extraordinary painting of a massive, venerable beech tree set firm in a Shropshire landscape, is, for instance, a powerfully loyalist testament. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1794, five years after the fall of the Bastille and in the midst of war, the painting would have been understood as an allusion to contemporary conservative celebrations of an ancient, organic British constitution as against the recent republican outgrowths of revolutionary France. As the exhibition catalogue argues, Sandby’s vision was also increasingly a Britannic one. Like Turner, Sandby made repeated tours throughout Wales and Scotland, representing not just their scenic and cultural differences, but also the ways in which these countries were undergoing change and becoming in some respects far more closely linked with England. . . .
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