PAUL SANDBY
1730 - 1809
Founder member of the Royal Academy.

SARAH BAYNTON-WILLIAMS'
COLLECTION OF
PRINTED WORKS.
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The exhibition at the Radnor Museum in Llandrindod Wells during June and July was held to mark the bi-centenary of Sandby's death. The Museum's exhibition room is the ideal place for showing pictures, spacious, airy and well lighted. There were nearly 100 framed prints shown on the walls and some illustrated books in a showcase, all of them original prints from Sarah's private collection.
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Sandby was an extremely talented artist, perhaps best know for his watercolours that earned him the title of the father of the watercolour. Although his printmaking was no less talented and was extremely influential in Britain, his prints did not attract the attention they deserve, and to this day there are some people who are very dismissive of the craft of printmaking. Anyone who visited this exhibition who had any doubt about Sandby's ability to make wonderful prints would quickly have seen this man in a new light. He started by making etchings of his environment in Scotland, working as draughtsman on the Great Survey of Scotland, after the 1745 rebellion, when Sandby was only sixteen years old. The first known etching is of a man and a woman on a seat; dated 1747. Later on Sandby was told the method of aquatint, a printing method that perfectly suited Sandby's landscapes. In the exhibition there were nine of the aquatints of north and south Wales, the first series of aquatints to be printed in Britain, splendid works of art, showing the Welsh landscape as never before. The exhibition included other etchings, aquatints and engravings by Sandby. It was unusual of a watercolour artist to make prints in any method, more often leaving printmaking to the professionals: Sandby had the ability to master all three of those methods.
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An integral section of the exhibition was a display of copper printing plates, both etching and aquatint, regrettably not by Sandby, but explained how these intricate prints were made.

The exhibition was well attended by a wide range of visitors from all parts. The remarks in the visitors' book were all very complimentary. One wrote that it was the best exhibition of prints that he had seen

 
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