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A British camp in the Netherlands 1748

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Date

1748

Description

A pen and ink and watercolour drawing of rows of tents in a flat green landscape, with a church in the middle distance on the right. An unfinished area in pencil in the left foreground shows a soldier with standard and rows of rifles. Inscribed on the verso in pencil, 'Sandby' and '15/-'. On two sheets of paper, joined at the centre, with a Villedary watermark.
Thomas Sandby trained as a military draughtsman at the Board of Ordnance, and worked for three years at their drawing room in Edinburgh before entering the employ of William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland during his campaign to defeat the Jacobites, concluding with the Battle of Culloden in 1746. An apocryphal anecdote first recorded by the critic John Williams suggests that it was Sandby who 'conveyed the intelligence of the [landing of the Young Pretender] to the Government in the year 1745' (see J. Bonehill and S. Daniels (eds), Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain, exh. cat., Royal Academy etc 2009, p. 78). Sandby also travelled with the Duke's party to the Netherlands in 1747-8 during the final stages of the War of Austrian Succession. Here he probably shows the Coldstream Guards' Camp at Eindhoven. Two further drawings by Sandby made in the Netherlands are RCINs 914726 and 914728.
Alternate title: The Coldstream Guards' Camp at Eindhoven, Low Countries
Descriptive Medium: 'Pencil, pen and ink and watercolour', 'pencil, pen and ink', 'watercolour painting'