Watercolour, 'Windsor Castle : the North Terrace looking west' by Paul Sandby, Britain, 18th century.

View of Windsor Castle, the North Terrace looking west. Castle at left, terrace with wall in foreground, view of the river and countryside at right. A soldier sits on wall at right. Figures including a group of women and children on terrace.

Paul Sandby has been called, erroneously, the 'father of English water-colour'. In fact water-colour was a well-established method, which Sandby's skills, practised over a long career, promoted and elevated. He was a founder member of the Royal Academy and this position enabled him to raise the water-colour to exhibition status.

This view is a very late version dating from about 1800, of an earlier subject. The original was painted sometime in 1770, and appeared as an aquatint in Sandby's publication 'Five Views of Windsor Castle and Eton, 1776-7'. Although he makes a concession to the passage of time by minor changes of costume, the figures themselves, and the architecture, are drawn from his old sketchbooks. The soldier seated on the parapet also appears in a drawing in the Royal Collection of the gardens at Old Somerset House. Sandby was a master of the dramatic composition, a device which raised his 'real views from nature' above mere topography. Here the picture is divided diagonally - the dark mass of the castle apartments, and the shadowed expanse of the terrace oppose a vast area of clear evening sky above the flat landscape of the Thames Valley.

Sandby was unusual amongst the 18th-century English water-colourists in that he used body colour (or gouache) for a large part of his output. This medium, in which the water-colour is mixed with white to make it opaque, was popular in the Continent. Sandby used pure water-colour for his military work and for subjects intended for the engravers, but he favoured body colour because it was better suited to the necessarily large scale of his exhibition works.

[Gill Saunders, '100 Great Paintings from the V&A', p.76]

D.1832-1904