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Published: 4 February 2010
by JOHN EVANS

NO lesser artist than Thomas Gainsborough described him as “the only man of genius” to produce “real views from Nature in this country”. 
Paul Sandby has often been referred to as “the father of modern landscape painting in watercolours” since an obituarist used such words to describe him 200 years ago. 
Yet his reputation was as much based on his innovative technical expertise, his influence on his students and contemporaries and his importance as a founder member of the Royal Academy in 1768, as for his undoubted skills as draughtsman and artist.
The Royal Academy next month features more than 80 of Sandby’s finest works to illustrate his remarkable range, described by one commentator as “embracing heroic composition on one hand and political squib on another”, and providing a social commentary on time of immense change.
In 1742, aged 17, Paul arrived in London from his native Nottingham with his brother Thomas, 21, who was already an accomplished topo­graph­ical draughtsman. 
These sons of a textile worker were rapidly to progress within the Hanoverian hierarchy, both obtaining work in the military drawing office at the Tower of London.
Thomas’s connections were to prove vital. His first patron was the Duke of Cumberland, the son of George II and the so-called “Butcher” who defeated the Jacobites at Culloden,  with whom he toured the Low Countries.
Paul joined the army’s Board of Ordnance survey of Scotland after the suppression of the rising. 
Its aims were part pacification, part unification, and involved map-making, planning fortifications and buildings, roads and bridges. It was in Scotland, notably on the streets of Edinburgh, that Sandby would develop his talents with “off-duty” studies of people going about their daily business, together with the landscapes of a changing country; here he devoted much of his time to etching.
Back in England, by 1752 Paul was in Windsor, where Thomas worked as Ranger of the Great Park, an area with which they and their works, including numerous studies of the royal estate, were to be forever associated. 
By 1753 Paul had become prominent enough to become a player in the formation of an academy, subsequently the Society of Artists and the RA. 
At this time he satirised William Hogarth with a series of caricatures, opposing his hostility to the Old Masters, depicting him as an inmate of Bedlam and referring to him as “a self-conceited arrogant dauber”. 
Thomas became the first professor of architecture at the new academy and later Grand Architect of the Order of Freemasons and joint Architect of the King’s Works. 
Paul was for 30 years chief drawing master at the Woolwich military academy. 
The brothers often collaborated and people often confused the two, but it was Paul who would work up studies for the older man with colour, characters or detail. 
In addition to his practice of using body­colour, Sandby pioneered and developed the aquatint method of etching in tone on copper, and the first set of aquatints, a dozen views of south Wales appeared in 1775. 
The affluent classes of the day were keen on the “picturesque” tour and his pictures, which inclu­ded a sense of atmos­phere and emotion as well as detail, were popular. 

• Paul Sandby RA (1731-1809): Picturing Britain, A Bicentenary Exhibition is in the Sackler Wing of the Royal Academy, Piccadilly, W1, from March 13-June 13. £9, concessions available, www.royalacademy.org.uk