CHAPTER 3 - Drawn from Nature

Summary

PAUL SANDBY AND THE TOPOGRAPHICAL LANDSCAPE

In his book The English Village Community and the Enclosure Movements, the historian W.E. Tate stated that beyond the 1780s, ‘little more is heard of the case for open-field agriculture and the maintenance of commons. In general, the writers of the period take it for granted that enclosure has come and come to stay.’ This is largely borne out by a glance at the work of the topographical painter, Paul Sandby (1731–1809) whose career effectively covered the majority of the period of parliamentary enclosure activity. Sandby was a painter who worked largely in watercolours; his work was especially noted for the extensive tours he made across Britain, and was remarkable for its range of rural, urban, modern and historical subject matter. In his time, he was celebrated as an artist ‘who, by his works, familiarized us with our own scenery’, while a recent exhibition, Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain (2009) stressed how his work provided an important record of a country experiencing rapid social, economic and political change. If we take Tate's assertion to be true, and that enclosure was a leading cause of this rapid change over Sandby's lifetime, it is perhaps not surprising that only a very small number of the works shown in this otherwise comprehensive exhibition gave any obvious indication of identifiable open field countryside.

Those few exceptions include an early (1749) view of common fields outside of Leith in Scotland, and one of The Meadows in a prospect of Sandby's native Nottingham.