Loop Head

An etching with aquatint of Loop Head, the long, narrow peninsula at the southwestern tip of County Clare where the Shannon Estuary opens into the Atlantic. The view is presumed to take in the white-painted lighthouse, in service since 1854, set back on the cliff edge above near-vertical sandstone strata. Etching renders the geometric clarity of the tower, keeper's house, and boundary wall through bitten line, while aquatint, with its powdered resin ground bitten in stages, supplies the tonal mass of cliff face, sea, and weather. Early's architectural training is legible in the disciplined drawing of the lighthouse compound — base, shaft, lantern, gallery — and in the way the man-made elements are sited within, rather than imposed upon, the cliff geology. The print belongs to her ongoing series of Irish and North Atlantic lighthouses, alongside Baily, Hook Head, Fastnet, and Fanad Head, which records working navigation structures as a particular kind of coastal architecture.