2-979-026 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

"The Entrance to the Texel - Stormy Weather", painted by William Vandevelde, from the Ellesmere Gallery, 1857. Engraving of a painting. 'What, then, can be more truthful than the long rolling swell of the waves impatiently urging each other on and indicating the quarter of the wind by the oblique direction of their serried ranks? You see, also, that the wind is momentarily increasing, for the foam is torn off their crests. How true to nature, also, is the breaking of the billow over the bows of the boat as she beats up courageously against the wind, leaving of the baffled wave nothing but salt spray and a surface of futile foam divided into a thousand meshed interstices! Then how grand are those gathering masses of cloud - those swelling piles of cumulus so low, threatening, and thunderous - that flake of cloud, too, on the right, contrasting so poetically in the azure of a higher and calmer stratum!'. From "Illustrated London News", 1857.