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At the time of his death in 1809, Paul Sandby was deemed "the father of modern landscape painting in water-colours" by the London Review and Literary Journal. Although by the date Sandby's watercolor style seemed old-fashioned and his used of gouache outmoded, he had been very much at the center of the related development of watercolor and landscape painting over the second half of the eighteenth century. Sandby was active in the formation of the Society of Artists in 1760 and eight years later was a founding member of the Royal Academy. Theses organizations offered artists a new sense of status and, through annual exhibitions, provided a new public for their art. That Sandby, a watercolorist trained as a topographer, should be directly and significantly involved in these developments speaks much of his personal prestige and of the rising fortunes of watercolor.
In 1746 Paul's elder brother Thomas became the draftsman for William Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland, serving with im in the Highlands, the Netherlands, and at Windsor, where Cumberland was appointed Ranger of Windsor Great Park. In 1764 Thomas Sandby became Cumberland's Steward and the Deputy Ranger. From the 1750s Paul was a frequent visitor to his brother at Windsor, and between 1763 and 1768 he exhibited eight views of Windsor Castle at the Society of Artists. One of the two views was possibly shows at the Society of Artists in 1766. The two are part of a set of four Windsor views at the Society of Artists exhibitions that led Paul to repeat the compositions in gouache, in watercolors, and in oils. He exhibited further views of the castle at the Royal Academy in 1774, 1775, and 1801, and he published a set of five Windsor views in aquatint in 1776.

Scott Wilcox

Wilcox, Forrester, O'Neil, Sloan. The Line of Beauty: British Drawings and Watercolors of the Eighteenth Century. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 2001. pg. 159 cat. no. 134.