An original 6 colour lithograph drawn on the plates by the artist at the Curwen Studio and printed in an edition of 500 numbered and signed copies on St Cuthbert's 225 gsm all rag paper by Adrian Lack at the Senecio Press, Charlbury, Oxfordshire.

Alan Powers was born in London in 1955 and studied Art History at Cambridge. He combines academic study with painting landscapes and buildings in Italy and England, and has also painted murals in the classical style. His work has been exhibited in Cambridge, London and Cornwall. In 1986 he produced [The Seaside Lithographs], a set of eight prints for The Spectator, and in 1988 The Marches [please email for details], a portfolio of lithographs for Merivale Editions. He is a frequent contributor to Country Life.

Sissinghurst Castle, Cranbrook, Kent, is famous for the garden created by Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson after 1933. The sequence of outdoor rooms was formed around the Elizabethan brick tower, overlooking the Weald, where Vita Sackville-West's writing room has been kept undisturbed. The tower has windows, quoins and stringcourses rendered to imitate stone, and the octagonal side-turrets originally had curvaceous cupolas.

Sissinghurst was never a proper castle and the long-lost main block of the house would always have been upstaged by the height of the tower, an example of the love of vertical gesture which was the Elizabethans' main contribution to domestic architecture. Sissinghurst Castle is now a property of the National Trust.

Merivale Prints: Lord Berners' Folly

Portfolio: Seaside Lithographs