Chapter 3 - Moving Pictures

Summary

3. Thomas Sandby, older brother of Paul Sandby, undertook a sketching tour of Derbyshire and the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1774. Although he was the first professor of architecture at the Royal Academy, his credentials as a cultural arbiter were questioned by some, not least because he never went on the continental Grand Tour. As John Bonehill argues in his chapter ‘Moving Pictures: Thomas Sandby Tours the East Midlands and Yorkshire’, however, Sandby used his English tour to help define his cultural authority, through producing paintings and prints of gentlemen’s seats, such as Wentworth Castle and Wentworth House in Yorkshire, and of s/r structures such as the Italianate palazzo Nottingham Castle. Bonehill shows that Sandby developed a mode of visual ‘storytelling’ that depicted these and other sites in associationist rather than statically picturesque terms, accentuating their geographical and historical connections and their place in wider networks of circulation. This approach at once proclaimed the extensiveness of his horizons as a landscape artist and the value of the scenes that he painted, now marked out as a kind of native ‘classic ground’.