THE PRINTS OF PAUL SANDBY

The title-page of the Christie's catalogue of one of the auction sales that followed the death of Paul Sandby (1731-1809) is sub-headed 'The Choicest Productions of his Pencil during a long Career of near Sixty Years'. It is hard to think of any other English eighteenth-century artist who enjoyed such a long and productive working life. Not only did Sandby make many hundreds of landscape and figure drawings and watercolours, but he was also an innovative and prolific printmaker as Ann V. Gunn's book The Prints of Paul Sandby (/yjj-/+8og): A Catalogue Raisonne so ably demonstrates (London and Turnhout, Brepols and Harvey Miller Publishers, 2015 [printed in 2016], 344 pp., 528 ills., €150). The sheer scale of Sandby's achievement - 376 prints are catalogued here - has, until now, deterred scholars and publishers from producing anything approaching a full record of the prints. In 1845 G. K. Nagler made an incomplete list in his Neues allgemeines Kunstler-Lexicon in which he divided the works into 34 sets or single prints (Munich, 1845, XIV> PP- 245~4-8)- William Arnold Sandby, the great-grandson of Paul's brother Thomas, devoted a chapter of his Thomas and Paul Sandby, Royal Academicians (London, 1892) to the painter's aquatints and, more importantly, bequeathed a collection of etchings, some of which are unique, to the British Museum. He did not, however, attempt to make a catalogue. In 1987 Bruce Robertson appended a list of prints to his PhD dissertation, Taul Sandby and the Early Development of English Watercolour' submitted to Yale University. Gunn includes useful summaries of these published and unpublished sources at the beginning of her catalogue and links them to her own text.