John Peter Gandy was born in 1787, into a family of artists and architects. His elder brother Joseph Michael Gandy became one of the most imaginative architectural draughtsmen of his age, and John Peter followed the same path early. He entered the Royal Academy Schools at eighteen, exhibited architectural fantasies, and made a name for himself as a draughtsman with both skill and invention.

In 1811, Gandy traveled with Sir William Gell and Keppel Craven to Greece as architectural draughtsman to the Society of Dilettanti’s second Ionian Mission.  He was young, talented, useful and exact, so much so that, later, he co-wrote Pompeiana with Gell.  From Naples, Gell supplied the research and authority; in London, Gandy wrote the text and helped make the excavated city intelligible to English readers.

But Gandy’s usefulness came at a cost. He was not merely a hired hand with a pencil. He traveled with Gell, worked beside him, and entered that charged little world in which scholarship, companionship and dependence could not always be separated. To Keppel Craven, Gandy’s place in Gell’s life was not harmless. It opened a rift that the published books politely conceal. Craven’s journal only hints at it. After Gell returned from an excursion with Gandy, Keppel noted that “Gandy sleeps in house for first time.”  From then on, Gandy’s place in Gell’s life was harder to dismiss.

One imagines Craven couldn’t have been thrilled.