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- Frederick Sandys
- Also known as
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Frederick Sandys
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primary name: Sandys, Frederick
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other name: Sands, Frederick
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other name: Sandys, Anthony Frederick Augustus
- Details
- individual; painter/draughtsman; printmaker; British; Male
- Life dates
- 1829-1904
- Biography
- Painter, draughtsman, designer of book-illustrations.
Sandys became a close friend of Rossetti in the 1860s and John Gere notes that Sandys's paintings of idealised half-length female figures are unquestionably Rossettian (Medea, painted in 1866-8 and now in the Birmingham Art Gallery, is an example), but, offended by rumours that Rossetti was accusing him of artistic plagiarism, Sandys broke off relations in 1869. He was above all a draughtsman of exceptional originality and skill, at his best in the designs for wood-engraved illustrations which he made in the 1860s for magazines like 'Good Words' and 'Once a Week', and which reflect the influence of the contemporary German school of illustrators such as Alfred Rethel and Julius Schnorr (see Forrest Reid, 'Illustrators of the Eighteen Sixties', 1928, pp. 55 etc. and Paul Goldman, 'Victorian Illustrated Books, 1850-1870', 1994, pp. 97 etc.). In the 1870s he developed an individual style of carefully finished portrait drawing using coloured chalks on tinted paper.
The family changed the surname from 'Sands' to 'Sandys'; Frederick signed with the surname 'Sands' in 1849.
- Bibliography
- ODNB
E. Wood, ‘A consideration of the art of Frederick Sandys’, The Artist, Photographer and Decorator, an Illustrated Monthly Journal of Applied Art [special winter number] (1896)
B. O'Looney, Frederick Sandys, 1829–1904 (1974) [exhibition catalogue, Brighton Museum and Art Gallery]
J A Gere, Pre-Raphaelite Drawings in the BM, 1994
Betty Elzea, 'Frederick Sandys (1829-1904); A catalogue raisonné', Antique Collectors' Club and Norfolk Museums and Archaelogy Service, Norwich, 2001.
