Island Life Magazine Ltd October/November 2009

life ISLAND HISTORY Shanklin Chine with Tower Cottage at the top. The bright blue sea means the sand is dyed. Riddle of the Sands? Sometimes it’s who you know, that matters. In the 1780s a Bavarian called Benjamin Zobel formed two significant friendships. The first was with the German artist, Schweickhardt, who worked as a “table decker” at Windsor Castle. The second was with an English painter George Morland remembered for land and seascapes of the Isle of Wight. When Schweickhardt retired Zobel took his place in the royal household, his job being to decorate the dining table for King George III using a long silver plateau filled with artistic designs in sand and marble. Seeing his creations quickly fall apart, Zobel developed a glutinous substance to bind the materials together so that permanent pictures could be 52 Article by Jan Toms made. Meanwhile, his friendship with Morland introduced him to the world’s most prolific supply of coloured sands, on the Isle of Wight. It was those pleasure seekers, the Victorians who discovered the sand picture as a hobby. The geology of the Island produces a seam of sand that through oxidation results in a unique range of shades. There are officially twenty-one different colours. By the 1840s the habit of making “chimney piece ornaments” by filling phials with contrasting sands was already included in the guidebook by Thomas Brettell. On her visit to Alum Bay in 1860 Queen Victoria was presented with various mementoes thus firing the tourist desire to take home a souvenir. Making a sand picture called for patience. A board was coated with the glue and the sand poured onto the surface, the excess then being shaken off. When measuring out different colours a long fingernail made a convenient scoop allowing the shade to be trickled onto the design. Sometimes the picture was drawn in ink beforehand and some artists outlined their work in black to get a clearer definition. The one colour not available was blue so any picture including this shade relied on dying the sand. The most prolific Victorian sand artist

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