Where the crows gather

This miniature jewel of a painting by Sarah Louisa Kilpack (1839–1909) shows the rocky coast at La Corbière in southwest Jersey. Kilpack is best known for her portrayals of stormy coastal scenes of the Channel Islands and she made a very successful living from her paintings in the latter part of the 19th century. This small-scale sunset view is a perfect distillation of the qualities that made her work so popular: whilst capturing the rugged beauty of the landscape and the dramatic potential of weather and light, she also introduces a human element and hint of narrative—here the Corbière lighthouse. At once emotive and poetic, it alludes to the location's treacherous identity as the scene of many shipwrecks, and also, with its flurry of gulls in the foreground, its etymology, as 'a place where crows gather'.