Paul Sandby (1731 – 1809) was an English map-maker turned landscape painter in watercolors, who, along with his older brother Thomas, became one of the founding members of the Royal Academy in 1768. Gainsborough singled him out as the only contemporary English landscape artist: ‘If one wanted ‘real Views from Nature in this Country’, declared Gainsborough in 1764, ‘there was no better artist than Sandby, who frequently employ’d his pencil that way.’Sandby was described in his obituaries as ‘the father of modern landscape painting in watercolors’