Paul Sandby: Calm after the storm

Do I really hate any artists – living artists, I mean? Do I hate their works and all that they stand for? Do I hate them with a vicious political passion? Think of some Americans, for example, and the way they seem to feel about gun control, abortion, climate change, Medicare, Obama. Are there any artists I feel about that way – and if I did, would I put it in print? No, I'd think it was mad.

OK. But suppose it wasn't me. Suppose it was an artist. Certainly, there are artists who view their colleagues with a terrible loathing and contempt. I can think of a very distinguished artist who becomes physically restless at the mere mention of another very well-known artist. Even so, would they declare this view in public? I doubt it.

But take it further. Imagine an artist who was willing to speak out against a rival and denounce their ideas, their values, their abilities. Would this artist express him- or herself in the form of an art form, in a visual satire? Would they, in other words, use their creative powers to insult their enemy? Again, it seems unlikely.

That's how it goes in our time. But in other times it wasn't so obvious. Go to Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain at the Royal Academy, for instance. The most conspicuous works in this show are a sequence of prints devoted to attacking a contemporary artist. They go the whole hog.

Sandby was young, in his early twenties. His target was the great old man of British art, William Hogarth. Hogarth had just published his artistic treatise, The Analysis of Beauty. Sandby replied with The Analysis of Deformity. His main points are that Hogarth's arguments had been plagiarised and his techniques were useless. But what drives him is his precocious confidence in his graphic power. Hogarth's vanity, "The Author run Mad", Sandby calls him, can be humbled and destroyed. The result is so offensive and grotesque and disturbing that – even by contemporary satirical standards – it feels a bit mad itself.

The symbolic details don't matter too much. The imagery itself is very powerful. In The Magic Lantern, a lantern picture is projected on a wall, but the light beams out of Hogarth's own open mouth – a strangely, surreally physical effect. Pugg's Graces suggests Hogarth's models, a trio of horribly deformed bodies. Piss and shit and murky vapour make several appearances. It isn't the least bit funny. But all through Sandby's engraving, there's a yucky mixture of grime and delicacy. He has a tone of fine draughtsmanship that is quite out of keeping with the violence and crudity and malice of his rhetoric. He feels like a deeply weird one.

If these prints had been his only works to survive, you might see in Sandby one of the wilder English talents, a visionary-scatological-caricaturist who anticipates the epic cartooning of James Gillray (who wasn't very humorous either). But it isn't so. This handful of vile, cruel and crazy scenes are the ones worth looking at, but they are vastly outnumbered by all his other works, which have nothing to do with the frenzies of art-world politics. See them beside his satires and you would hardly recognise that they come for the same hand.

Sandby lived from 1731 to 1809. What he's more famous for, if you can call him famous, are closely observed British landscapes. That's his true specialisation. Gainsborough called him "the only man of Genius who has painted real views from Nature in this country". And I daresay British art-lovers generally prefer this kind of thing, rather than disgusting and slightly obscure cartoons. Our landscapes are sometimes exciting and sometimes soothing, but at least they're not controversial. Right?

Actually no. Landscape in the 18th century is controversial too, full of sharp distinctions, disagreements, conflicts. Henry Fuseli, addressing his pupils, identified a particularly low branch of painting, and he gave it some choice insulting names: "the tame delineation of a given spot"; "what is commonly called Views"; "little more than topography"; "a kind of map-work". And this is the kind of unimaginative, servile landscape in which Sandby himself worked.

Quite literally: he had trained, as a teenager, as a topographer and a mapmaker in Scotland. He started by making the maps of British victory. One of the first pages in this exhibition is an overhead view of the terrain of Culloden Moor. It is a trophy survey of the ground where the Jacobite rebellion had finally been defeated. We look down on the conquered land.

It is also an amazing bit of ink work, yielding even here Sandby's strange physical sensation. The more accurate its record of the mountainous forms is, the more fanciful its vision actually becomes. They look like intestines, tripe, corals, anemones. And in one way, it could help being visually imaginative. Before the age of the balloon, no artist could look with a true bird's eye.

But most of his views are ground level, and more ordinary. We see nature, stretching out for miles, both in breadth and in distance. Though not maps, they convey almost the same quantity and clarity of information. Houses, forestation, fields, their setting out, are plainly delineated. The possibilities of imagination are reduced, nor are they even desired. Patient accuracy is its honour.

What these pictures have in common with maps is the power of overview. The scene owns the land. And the subject is often literally a bit of private property, or ground for national use. He shows off parkland, as in View in Luton Park, with grand oaks and beeches – venerable trees that stand for the history of great families. There is the modern utilitarian landscape, agricultural and industrial, of A View of Vintners Boxley, Kent, with Mr Whatman's Turkey Paper Mills, planted all over with signs of production. Or the panoramic prospect is filled with military activity, as in The Camp on Warley Common.

His landscapes are not just a matter of spectacles and riches. Sandby is aware of the pleasures of contemplation. He likes to provide a clear air and a faraway horizon to give us a feeling of freedom. There is a bit of survey – and a bit of tame infinite too.

But these landscapes remain empirical. And there is a big difference between the mind that observes and the mind that dreams. Gainsborough, while commending Sandby, qualified his praise. He said that "to have anything tolerable of the name of G[enius], the Subject altogether as well as figures &c must be of his own Brain." Sandby's genius for real views was actually a limited kind of genius. For Gainsborough, free shape invention is the great thing. It's extraordinary, really, that these two approaches to landscape should have the same name. One is documentary. The other is almost abstraction.

As a very young artist, in his Hogarth satires, Sandby found a vein of furious madness, inspired by his proud abilities. He never found it again. For the rest of his long life, he practiced his superb skills on real landscape with a precise, correct sobriety. Perhaps it's better that he doesn't take the other way, for his own sake. But I'd like to know what his imagination might have turned into.

Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain, to 13 June, Royal Academy, London (0844 209 1919; www.royalacademy.org.uk)