3-017-079 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

"The Land's-End: Sunset Before A Stormy Night" by S. P. Jackson, in the exhibition of the Society of Painters in Water Colours, 1865. Engraving of a painting. 'The view Mr. Jackson represents is the most westerly extremity of Cornwall...And what solid bastions and ramparts it opposes to the incessant attacks of the mighty western ocean! - walls of granite and other primary rocks instead of the chalk, the lime, and sandstones upon which the sea so rapidly encroaches round other parts of the island. Even here, however, there are evidences of some of nature's levelling agencies in the boulders cropping out among the breakers and the pinnacle of rock in the offing surmounted by the Longship's Lighthouse...The aspect of this rugged, inhospitable-looking, and now storm-threatened shore seems to be in grim keeping with the barbarous and diabolical practices of the Cornish wreckers...The sun sets, red and lurid, behind a great bank of ominously black cloud; the gulls flutter uneasily or circle about screaming, to collect young stragglers to the safe roost among the rocks'. From "Illustrated London News", 1865.