[Twelve Views in North Wales]

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THE AQUATINT PROCESS COMES TO ENGLAND IN A SERIES OF ENGRAVINGS OF WALES. First edition, complete, folio in landscape format, twelve aquatint plates printed in sepia, each view captioned on the plate and with publishing information, first plate (Overton Bridge) with title in upper margin. Original blue wrappers, expertly and almost invisibly rebacked, housed in a folding cloth case with gilt cover lettering, small rust stain on blank right margin of first image (outside plate mark). An excellent copy. (513*342 mm). (Abbey Scenery 511). This is the second part of three individually issued series of aquatint views of Wales by Paul Sandby. It is complete as issued. The first part was published one year earlier and was the first book to contain aquatints. Sandby was born at Nottingham in 1725, and lived into his eighties. Training made him accurate, for he served in the military drawings department of the Tower of London and in a military roads survey of the Highlands. In 1751 he left the survey to live at Windsor where his brother Thomas was deputy ranger of the Great Park. In 1768 he became drawing master at the Woolwich Military Academy, and was a founder member of the Royal Academy: he also had a talent for caricature and doggerel. The aquatint views are beautifully drawn and full of life, enjoyment and a light touch. He introduced the process [of aqua tinting] to England and named it. The secrets of aquatint had apparently been purchased from Jean Baptiste Le Prince by the Hon. Charles Grenville, who made them over to Sandby as a private monopoly at the start and would not part with them when Gilpin wanted access to this method. The first group of Welsh Views is dedicated to the Honourable Charles Grenville and Joseph Banks Esquire by their ever grateful and much obliged servant Paul Sandby RA. This title page for XII Views in Aquatinta from Drawings taken on the spot in South Wales (17775) was the first aquatint views published in England, with its pleasant lettering, lyre pattern border, and dark ground as rich as a mezzotint, neoclassical. His thirty-six plates published in three parts over three years show moonlight, wild mountains, dark shadow and sun in the trees of summer, a quiet farmyard, busy smoky forge, castles and great houses. In a few of the early plates he etched dark areas, or used roulette for coarseness behind aquatint. These sepia aquatints imitated current practice in water colour drawing, and the temptations towards colour developed later. Sara Prideaux thought the student will find it instructive to compare his early with his later work, and to note the gradual improvement and increasing effectiveness of his method; at first he used the needle freely for purpose of definition, but ended by trusting entirely to the aquatint tones to produce the desired effect. Sandby's range in these thirty six prints was not merely impressive, but complete. And the engraving is everything from patches of deep etching where areas of ink stand out in relief, to the extreme fineness of, for instance, Harlech Castle. Using a good quality magnifying glass with a multiple of six, one sees his total control of aquatint. (Franklin, Themes in Aquatint, p8-9).