This item is a steel engraving from the original painting by George Cole Called “SUNSET-SUSSEX.”  It was engraved by J. Saddler and published in 1877.  The engraving is in very good condition.  It measures 6 7/8” x 9 7/8”, and is matted to 11” x 14” for easy framing.

Sussex, one of the most delightful pastoral counties in the south of England, bordering on the English Channel, has furnished an interesting field for the study of landscape Art, and one that is scarcely equaled on the British Islands. Like the neighboring county of Surrey, the scenery of which is well known to English and American Art-lovers through the medium of the works of Birket Foster and Bellows as well as those of George Cole, whose charming landscape we have engraved, it presents a constant succession of pastorals, very few of which have as yet lost their interest from repetition by wandering artists and sketches.

Sussex, the subject of this engraving, is strikingly suggestive of the rolling character of the scenery of the coast-region, and is, perhaps, as much a reminiscence of the landscape as a real view. There are the board and dusty road, with the farmer leading his team, while his wife holding her babe rides in the wagon on their way home from the distant market-town; the drove of sheep struggling to cross the rustic bridge, which is yet blocked by the farm-wagon; the trees in the foreground and the farm-cottage which show their dark shadows as the sun sinks behind the distant hills. In the background the village at the base of the hills is bathed in sunlight, and this brightness is repeated in the foreground and upon the treetops here and there throughout the broad expanse of hill and dale within the limits of the view. The picture is charming in its characteristics of local scenery, and introduces us to an artist, the poetry of whose nature may be inferred from the brilliant imagery with which he has endowed his work.  Mr. Cole is a London artist, who for more than a quarter of century has been enrolled among the members of the Society of British Artists, in whose gallery his works have held a very prominent position; and most deservedly so, for in many respects Mr. George Cole, father of Mr. Vicat Cole, A.R.A., may by classed with the best of living English landscape-painters.