May This drawing has also been dated to the s, but again no attempt has been made to identify the sitter. Probably instructing the sons of George III,7 and certainly members of the Greville, Harcourt, Williams Wynn and other noble or landed families, he clearly operated at the top end of this particular market. In the two closely related works under discussion there can be little doubt that Sandby has recorded one of his pupils β the young daughter of a wealthy family.
The scale of the window behind her suggests a room of generous proportions. She sits at an ingenious painting table with sliding trays, containing shells of colours, which can be pulled out for work in watercolours or left partly closed for drawing; a palette for mixing colours attached to one of the front legs may be swivelled in or out according to the activity.
Probably, with the trays fully closed and the adjustable top laid flat, this piece of furniture functioned as a card table or something similar. More clearly in the watercolour than in the chalk drawing, we see that the lower sash of the window behind her which would have been subdivided by glazing bars holding small panes has been fully raised. The view we glimpse through it β in the watercolour β was first identified by the present writer in Although these medieval buildings are partly obscured by trees today, their distinctive configuration remains unchanged Figs.
The most likely candidate for consideration as a sizeable house on the river bank almost opposite Lambeth Palace where Paul Sandby might have been employed in the s to instruct the daughter or daughters of a wealthy family is the old Grosvenor House. Of seventeenth-century origin, but extensively remodelled in the early s, it had passed from Alexander Davies into the Grosvenor family through the marriage of his daughter Mary in , at the age of twelve, to Sir Thomas Grosvenor, 3rd Baronet.
A substantial red-brick house of two main storeys, it was set back from the river by a garden and was skirted by a public pathway. It stood until when it was demolished, having been vacated by the Grosvenors, presumably in the light of proposals for the building of what was eventually to be the Millbank Penitentiary on land to the south. A painting by Daniel Turner, probably dating from just before its demolition, strikingly illustrates the relationship of Grosvenor House, seen obliquely on its extreme left, to Lambeth Palace in the distance, on the right Fig.
