Every so often an artist comes along who manages to change the way people think about or record the world, and in the process help launch a new kind of art. It happened in the mid-18thc in Britain when a school of landscape painting emerged, unlike anything which had preceded it . The man largely responsible was Paul Sandby.
He’s not exactly a household name but as the New York Times said about an exhibition of his work in 2010 “he comes out as the unlikely founding father of a dazzling school of European art.”
It was Thomas Gainsborough himself no slouch at landscape painting who told a potential client in 1764 that if he wanted “real Views from Nature in this Country”, he should turn to Sandby, who was “the only Man of Genius … who has employ’d his pencil that way”
Sandby’s images contributed to the emerging appreciation of British landscape, the development of domestic tourism and the way that landscapes and even gardens were appreciated and portrayed both then and today.
Many of you will remember I’m sure the best-selling comic history book 
The Garden History Blog 
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