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Artist J.M.W. Turner, RA. The Engravings. Perhaps the most famous English Romantic landscape artist. Turner
products many engravings and was very hands-on in there progress to printings.
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St Michael's Mount, Cornwall
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| The subject of this beautiful picture, now in the Sheepshanks Collection at South Kensington, is a remarkable
granite rock, about a circumference and two hundred and fifty feet high, in Mounts Bay, Cornwall. It has been famous from the very
early times in the Phoenician merchants used to come to Cornwall for tin; it was a favourite resort for worship of the Ancient
Britons, and, soon after the introduction of Christianity, became a place of pilgrimage. Here a hermitage was founded in the fifth
century by St. Kelna, and afterwards a Benedictine Priory was built here. the refectory of which is now the dining-room of the
present proprietor. Sir J. St. Aubyn, Bart. Around its base and covered with sand there are the remains of a forest. This rock and
the building on its summit also played a part in the civil war, when it was fortified by Charles I. and taken by Colonel Hammond.
Turner, by a clever management of clouds and light, has made the curious rock with its picturesque castle stand out in all its
peculiar beauty, and any one can discern, even in the engraving, the marvellous power with which the wet shining sand and its
reflections are painted by the artist |
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