The Land's End, Cornwall

Warm pink and gold rocks stack up along the Cornish shoreline in this coastal view by James Dickson Innes, a Welsh painter who worked in the early twentieth century. The cliffs drop steeply toward a calm blue sea, their surfaces catching sunlight while tufts of green cling stubbornly to the tops. A few gulls drift near the rock faces, and the water stretches flat and quiet all the way to the horizon. This is Land's End, the westernmost tip of mainland England, a place that has pulled in artists and wanderers for generations with its wild, windswept edges. Innes painted it with loose, textured strokes that favor mood over careful detail.

Bright color and quick, feeling-driven brushwork became Innes's trademark. He often traveled with his friend Augustus John, the two of them wandering the countryside in search of landscapes that stirred something in them. His story carries a sadness, since tuberculosis took his life when he was only twenty-seven, which lends his small body of work an added tenderness. This sunlit stretch of Cornish coast feels peaceful and unhurried, a soft glimpse of one of Britain's most storied shorelines.