Paul Sandby

Paul Sandby was born in Nottingham, England. Most modern scholarship favors a birth year of 1731, though some earlier auction and reference sources give 1725 or 1730. He is not documented as having attended a formal school of art or held a degree. He learned drawing largely from his elder brother, the architect and draughtsman Thomas Sandby, and in 1747, following the Jacobite rising, was appointed a draughtsman to the Military Survey of Scotland, work that grounded his lifelong interest in precise topographical observation.

By the 1750s Sandby had settled in London and turned increasingly toward watercolour views of castles, country houses, and military and civic scenes, alongside etching and aquatint printmaking, a technique with which he is closely associated in Britain. He and his brother Thomas had also begun giving drawing lessons in London by 1753, and teaching remained a steady source of income throughout his career. He exhibited with the Society of Artists of Great Britain until 1768, when he became one of the founding members of the Royal Academy of Arts. He went on to exhibit almost annually at the Royal Academy from its first exhibition in 1769 until his death in 1809, and he served for many years, reported as roughly 1768 to 1796, as chief drawing master at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich.

Sandby died at his house in Paddington, London, in November 1809. Sources differ on whether the exact date was 7 or 8 November, and a small number of reference works give 9 November; the month and year are consistent across all major sources. He was buried in the burial ground of St George's, Hanover Square. His obituaries described him as the father of modern landscape painting in watercolours, a title that has stuck in art-historical writing since. He should not be confused with the later, unrelated watercolourist Paul Sandby Munn, whose auction and museum records are tracked separately.

After his death in 1809, obituarists named him "the father of modern landscape painting in watercolours," a phrase still used across museum and reference sources to summarize his reputation. Modern institutional reassessment, including the 2009 to 2010 exhibition Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain, organized by the National Galleries of Scotland and shown at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, reaffirmed his place as a founding figure of the watercolour tradition and a meticulous chronicler of eighteenth-century British landscape, architecture, and military life.

Sandby's market operates almost entirely through works-on-paper and Old Master drawing sales rather than major evening auctions, and no all-time auction record for his work could be verified from public sources as of this profile's data date. Recent 2026 auction listings illustrate the current range rather than a ceiling: Sotheby's offered the watercolour Pembroke Castle, Wales in its Master Works on Paper from Five Centuries sale with an estimate of GBP 6,000 to 8,000, and Freeman's listed a joint lot of American views by Thomas Pownall and Paul Sandby, in its Printed and Manuscript Americana sale, estimated at USD 8,000 to 12,000. Both figures are pre-sale estimates rather than confirmed hammer prices. Larger, more fully finished watercolours or important early aquatint series have historically reached higher prices at Christie's, Sotheby's, and Bonhams, though a specific record lot could not be confirmed here.

No catalogue raisonne of Sandby's work is confirmed as published, so attribution and authentication lean heavily on museum print-room scholarship, particularly at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum, and on Royal Academy provenance records. Because his market is thin and composed largely of individual works on paper rather than a continuous run of comparable evening-sale results, collectors should treat any single auction result with caution rather than as a benchmark. Collectors should also take care not to confuse his auction and museum records with those of the separate, later watercolourist Paul Sandby Munn.