Paul Sandby was a fruitful drawing master and a multitalented landscape artist who made both topographical and picturesque portrayals of nature.¹ In the late eighteenth century, the British became tourists in their own backyard, enjoying the varied landscapes of their native land. Before other British artists flocked to the popular spots and grandeur of nature in Scotland and Wales, Paul Sandby traveled there to paint the sites and surroundings. Beginning in 1771, he took extensive tours there with his patron Sir Watkin Williams Wynn. His example played a significant part in forming ideas on the picturesque and romantic landscape traditions.

 
In the late 1790s, Sandby’s age and economic situation, due to a declining market for his work, limited his ability to make the grander tours further afield that he had made earlier in his career. Instead, it suited him to make sketching trips from London to nearby places. Sandby’s impressive Saint Albans Abbey from the Northwest with the Sun Rising is from this time period.

 
Sandby experimented with the watercolor technique and became a frequent user of body color, known by the French as gouache, which gives a richness in appearance. Whereas watercolors are typically mixed with a transparent binding, such as gum, and applied in thin color washes, this opaque watercolor technique consists of dry pigments bound by clay or lead white and made with a thick application. The artist worked from dark to light, as with oil paint, creating lighter tones by adding white. This technique differs from that of watercolor, which works from light to dark and uses bare, untouched, or “reserved” paper for the highlights.

 
Sandby was an active member of the Royal Academy, exhibiting almost every year from 1769 to 1809. He presented two exhibition-size views of Saint Albans in successive years, one View near St. Albans in 1797 and this larger composition in 1798, then called A N.W. View of St. Albans—the Effect of Morning.² To compete with oils on view, watercolors and gouaches became larger, and Sandby intentionally used gouache for his exhibition works because of its dense, saturated color.³ For a number of years, Sandby made pairings of two views of the same site from opposite directions and from differing vantage points. These paired views of named places on noble estates appeared together on exhibition at the Royal Academy. For instance, in 1767, he displayed Two Views of Wakefield-Lodge, in Whittlebury Forest, the Seat of His Grace the Duke of Grafton as well as A View of Windsor from Little Park and A View of the Thames, from Mr. Munden’s Door at Windsor.⁴

 
Saint Albans Cathedral, referred to as the Abbey in the eighteenth century, is located northwest of London in Hertfordshire. It was founded in the eighth century and was the burial site of Britain’s first saint. Sandby made both of his exhibition-size gouache compositions of Saint Albans after a sketching trip there in 1789. A watercolor inscribed 1789 in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery was probably made on site. It approaches Saint Albans from the southwest, similar to the composition View of Saint Albans, also called Saint Albans Cathedral with Cattle Watering and a Girl Crossing a Footbridge, which is signed and dated 1796 and appeared on the London art market at Christie’s and the Leger Galleries in 1976 (fig. 11.1).⁵

 
In Saint Albans Abbey from the Northwest with the Sun Rising, the trees are boldly drawn and the cathedral and city are depicted with accuracy as they recede into the background in the shady blue and purple haze of early morning. In the foreground, a pair of timeless figures, a peasant woman and a soldier, meet in the cut of the hillside along the rural road. This simple social exchange or possibly an amorous meeting within the landscape is heightened by the carefully defined band of light leading down to the figures from the sun rising behind the church. Such clearly defined rays of light were a common pictorial device in landscapes, and in watercolors they enhance the romantic landscape’s atmospheric tonality. In the latter part of his career, Sandby would often insert dramatic features such as sunsets, storms, and rays of light breaking through the clouds. He also utilized the light beam as a compositional line. The strong diagonal brings attention to the figures, who are small in scale in comparison to the prominently placed cathedral. Sandby also used bands of sunlight in his aquatint View of Llangollin, in the County of Denbigh or Pont-y-Pair over the River Conway above Llanrwst in the County of Denbigh and in his gouache Pimble Meer, on Lake Bala.⁶

 
The romantic elements of Sandby’s composition indicate the full flowering of his achievements, which was marked by new developments occurring with the emergence of artists such as Joseph Mallord William Turner and Thomas Girtin, who had benefited from training at the informal academy at the home of the art connoisseur and amateur artist Dr. Thomas Monro. They studied and copied works by John Robert Cozens (1752–1797). Similar compositional devices are seen in their work. For instance, a beam of light draws attention to small figures in the background of Turner’s Tintern Abbey, the Transept, and another falls across a broad landscape in Girtin’s Alnwick Castle from Brizlee, Northumberland.⁷ Though they, along with Peter De Wint, were of a later generation of artists, like Sandby, they too created romantic depictions of Saint Albans Abbey.⁸ —Dena M. Woodall