Art review: Paul Sandby

PAUL SANDBY: PICTURING BRITAIN***NATIONAL GALLERY COMPLEX

IT IS AN ILL wind that blows no good, but the Scottish Gaels would have found it hard to find any good in the terrible Hanoverian wind that blew through the Highlands after Culloden. Like all the subsequent imperial wars for which it was a rehearsal, including the American conquest of the West, the "pacification" that followed was a brutal subjugation of a people deemed racially inferior because different. It was argued then and has been argued ever since that finally securing the Hanoverian succession against the return of the Stuarts justified all the brutality. A plague on both their houses is the best reply to that. Nevertheless, there is one tool created for this "pacification" that we still use most gratefully. Military control of difficult terrain demands proper maps. Mapping the Highlands was undertaken by the military Department of Ordnance in 1746; what began there was later extended to the whole British Isles; the Ordnance Survey maps we use to this day still bear the name that declares their original purpose of military offense and control.

Map conventions were not yet strictly codified. There was scope for artistic licence in describing landscape features. There were also castles and other fortifications throughout the Highlands whose condition and usefulness had to be assessed. Artists were indispensable in the survey team and two brothers, Thomas and Paul Sandby, began their careers in this service. The exhibition at the National Gallery, Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain, deals primarily with Paul, the younger brother, but they often worked together and some of Thomas's independent work is also shown.

The thesis proposed by the exhibition's subtitle is that the pictorial side of the surveying work that Paul undertook was the parent of the watercolour picturesque view that was to be one of the central features of British art over the next century. This military proto-picturesque is represented here by a watercolour sketch of Castle Duart, subsequently worked up into a full military description with three views of the castle, a plan to scale and an indicator of the orientation. From these sinister beginnings, he went on to make picturesque views of places in Scotland, England and Wales. He also made portraits of estates and country houses, starting with a superb view of Drumlanrig. Many of these wide country views eloquently combine his skill as a topographer with a feeling for landscape and considerable mastery of light.

Paul Sandby came to Scotland in 1747 to join his brother in Edinburgh. Drawings that he did to demonstrate his qualification for the job of military cartographer do not suggest much talent, but four years later he left Scotland an accomplished artist. There are beautiful drawings here done of life in the streets of Edinburgh, the crowd at an execution, a horse fair on Bruntsfield Links, or soldiers escorting two Jacobite prisoners wearing Highland dress and shackled together. The latter records a moment of understated tragic drama as one of the Highlanders turns in his captivity towards a woman carrying a child. This same group reappears to give pathos to a drawing by Thomas Sandby of a huge military encampment at Fort Augustus at the head of Loch Ness, although in service to the Duke of Cumberland, Sandby clearly felt little sympathy for the fate of the Highlanders.

If Paul Sandby became an artist while he was in Edinburgh, neither exhibition nor catalogue addresses the question of how this happened. Edinburgh was not a dull place and Sandby certainly knew people there. He was friendly enough with the elder Allan Ramsay, for instance, to illustrate his pastoral the Gentle Shepherd with a series of etchings. He also went on thereafter to become an outstanding printmaker. His etched Cries of London are vivid and lively although they also suggest that he was no more sympathetic to the poor of London than to the people of the Highlands. There are also several early etchings of Scottish subjects here and clearly it was in Edinburgh that he learnt to make prints. His most likely teacher was Richard Cooper, who had established printmaking in Scotland and who also ran a drawing academy. Sandby is credited with the invention of aquatint, the technique of etching areas of tone. Here he uses it with great skill in a series of prints of Wales. Cooper was experimenting with this technique long before this, however, and so it seems likely that it was from him that Sandby learnt it. It would have been good to have seen evidence of some curiosity about all this and the impact Edinburgh had on Sandby, but there is no hint of it. We are rather left to imagine that he came as a missionary to bring artistic light into a dark country. On his return to London, Sandby used his new skill as a printmaker to conduct a scurrilous print campaign against William Hogarth. It was a pygmy attacking a giant, but was nevertheless a sustained, even pathological attack that must have caused Hogarth a great deal of pain. His publication of the Analysis of Beauty in 1753, its ostensible occasion, could hardly explain such visual vitriol. The real reason it seems was Hogarth's determined hostility to the creation of a new academy, on the French model, which Sandby championed and which was eventually realised after Hogarth's death as the Royal Academy under the patronage of George III. The Sandby brothers were loyal Hanoverians. Indeed Thomas became Deputy Ranger of Windsor Great Park and was thus a Royal servant. Paul himself also did a fine series of drawings of Windsor Castle. Hogarth's objection to an academy was that it would be a bastion of conservatism. He was right, of course.

Hogarth was also the first artist to define himself in a recognisable way as "modern": as creating an art for the present that was not subservient to the past. It seems, therefore, that these very nasty prints give Sandby the dubious honour of fathering the deep-seated hostility to modern art that was to persist in England for more than two centuries.

Though there seems to be no reference to it anywhere, several pictures here also provide intriguing evidence that the Sandbys anticipated the Panorama that Robert Barker launched in Edinburgh in 1788 – a view of Ben Lomond by Paul is composed from contiguous drawings made with a camera obscura. (A painting of Roslin by Paul Sandby shows Lady Frances Scott using this optical device.) There is also a superb panoramic drawing of Edinburgh itself that suggests that this interest may have begun in the city 40 years before Barker launched his invention. There is also a remarkable drawing here of Nottingham Market Square by Thomas Sandby. The centre seems strangely empty until you realise that that is where you are standing. You are in the picture; it is intended to surround you on the arc of circle. (One of those clunky bits of furniture that still clutter the National Gallery prevents you getting close enough to see this properly.) Sandby also decorated a room, now destroyed, that a contemporary actually compared to Barker's Panorama. Two drawings of the terrace of Somerset House by the brothers working together, however, provide the clearest evidence of their deploying a Panorama-like form. The parapet along the Thames runs through both drawings. They appear to meet at a sharp angle, but the parapet was actually straight. This, and the marked difference in the angle of the shadows in the two drawings, would only make sense if they were joined together and presented on an arc of 270 degrees. Canaletto had also painted two paintings of this same terrace facing in two directions from a single viewpoint. At the very least, here the Sandbys provide a link between Canaletto and the later development of the panorama. Here, as elsewhere, it seems, this exhibition stops short of its own potential.

• Until 7 February

CRITIC'S CHOICE

Duncan Shanks: In Search of Time Past

Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, until 28 November

DUNCAN Shanks is one of the most original painters working in Scotland today. Whether it is the landscape around his home in the Clyde Valley or still-life in his studio, he brings a unique and vivid poetry to whatever he paints. His show at the Scottish Gallery ends this week. Don't miss it.

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