Windsor Terrace Looking Eastward 1809

Paul Sandby made this print, "Windsor Terrace Looking Eastward," using a technique called aquatint. This process creates broad areas of tone, rather than the fine lines you'd get with an etching. Aquatint involves protecting certain areas of a metal plate with a resist, then exposing the rest to acid. This creates a textured surface that holds ink. Sandby would have repeated this process multiple times to build up the rich tonal range we see here, moving from light to dark. The result is something like a watercolor painting, but with the reproducibility of printmaking. Looking at this image, you can see that Sandby has captured a sense of atmosphere and depth, the texture of the stone and foliage. Aquatint was particularly well-suited to depictions of landscape, responding to a fashion for the picturesque. It also allowed for the relatively quick production of images for a growing market, blurring the boundaries between fine art and commercial craft.