Lighthouses

The lighthouse is among the most architecturally distinctive and visually compelling of all functional structures, and antique prints of lighthouses reflect that appeal with unusual consistency across four centuries of maritime illustration. Standing at the margins of land and sea, built to resist the most extreme forces of wind and wave, visible from miles offshore and associated with the saving of lives from shipwreck, the lighthouse carries a symbolic weight that few other engineering structures can match. Artists and illustrators recognised this quality and exploited it with considerable skill, producing images that combine topographical documentation with the visual drama of structures genuinely tested by the environments they inhabit.

The history of lighthouse construction is itself a history of progressive engineering achievement, and the prints documenting the great lighthouse building projects of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are important records of that achievement. The Eddystone lighthouse, built on a dangerous rock fourteen miles off Plymouth, was rebuilt three times between 1696 and 1882, each reconstruction representing an advance in lighthouse engineering, and the prints documenting successive Eddystone towers are primary evidence for the development of offshore lighthouse design. John Smeaton’s third Eddystone tower, completed in 1759, was the first lighthouse to use hydraulic lime mortar and became a model for subsequent wave-swept lighthouse construction worldwide; the prints depicting it are documents of one of the significant achievements in the history of civil engineering.

The Bell Rock lighthouse, built on a submerged reef off the coast of Angus in Scotland and completed by Robert Stevenson in 1811, generated one of the most comprehensive illustrative records of any engineering project of the period. Stevenson documented the construction process in detail, and the prints produced from his drawings and from the work of artists who visited the site show the extraordinary challenges of building in a tidal environment where the working surface disappeared beneath the sea for most of every day. These images are among the finest examples of engineering illustration in the entire antique print tradition.

The topographical tradition of lighthouse illustration — depicting specific towers in their coastal settings, combined with views of the surrounding coastline and seascape — is of particular interest for Australian lighthouses. The progressive establishment of lighthouse services along the Australian coast through the nineteenth century, marking the approaches to Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and the other colonial ports, generated views of towers whose architectural distinctiveness and dramatic coastal settings made them attractive subjects for topographical artists. These Australian lighthouse prints are important documents in the maritime and engineering history of the colonies.

Lighthouse keepers and their families — living in isolation on remote headlands or offshore rocks, maintaining the light through all weathers and seasons — attracted the interest of writers and illustrators who recognised in the lighthouse keeper’s life a subject of considerable human interest. The social world of the lighthouse station, with its routines of watch-keeping, maintenance and the management of supply, appears in illustration of a more domestic and human character than the architectural and engineering imagery that dominates the tradition.

For collectors of maritime history, engineering history or coastal topography, antique lighthouse prints offer material of consistent visual drama and genuine historical interest. The combination of architectural distinction, engineering achievement, maritime association and human significance gives lighthouse imagery an appeal that extends well beyond the specialist maritime collector, and original examples of quality are consistently sought-after.