Fastnet Lighthouse - Plans Section

The most explicit expression of Early's architectural background, this print presents Fastnet Rock Lighthouse as orthographic drawing rather than picturesque view. The Fastnet, completed in 1904, is a granite tower 54 metres tall standing on a single sea-stack four miles off County Cork, the southernmost point of Ireland and often the last sight of land for transatlantic shipping. Treating the structure as a sectional plan, Early uses fine etched line for the technical drawing convention and aquatint for the body of the rock and the surrounding sea, producing a hybrid between intaglio printmaking and architectural representation. The print invokes the engineer's section drawing as an aesthetic object in its own right. Within her wider lighthouse cycle this is the formal declaration: the buildings she draws are first read as construction, only secondarily as image, a register that distinguishes her work from the sentimental lighthouse pictorial tradition.