Enthusiasts for the remarkable work of Joseph Michael Gandy—visionary, perspectivist to Sir John Soane, romantic evoker of the sublime—have been a small but indomitable band. This is the book for which we have been waiting many years. Since the 1970s, Brian Lukacher has been researching the work of Gandy—ferreting out unknown pictures, discovering the anatomy of a life and oeuvre. He knows more than anyone else is ever likely to know about his remarkable and scintillating subject. In short this publication could not be more welcome. Gandy (1771–1843) is in many ways a bit of a sad case. He had high hopes and initial success as an architect, and was even elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1803. Yet he ended up a failure—the draughtsman to a more successful architect, endlessly in debt (and twice imprisoned for it), ultimately incarcerated by his own family in a lunatic asylum near Plymouth where he died of dysentery in conditions condemned by an official inspection of 1843 as “foul and disgusting.” But his work—especially the large water-colored drawings—was inspired and outstanding. In their own right, his architectural drawings and myth-historical fantasies are among the supreme statements of the sublime created in...