Building Miraflores lock / J. Pennell.

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Joseph Pennell's 1912 lithograph shows the Miraflores Locks, one of the three lock sites that lifted and lowered ships between the Pacific and the Culebra Cut on the Panama Canal. Pennell, an American printmaker, made a series of lithographs of the canal works in the years before it opened, and this view records the massive concrete chambers and their machinery while the project was still under construction. The print is signed on the stone, a detail that marks it as one of the artist's own impressions rather than a reproduction. Its subject, the engineering of a lock that had to handle ships through a rising and falling water level, captures one of the period's most ambitious public works.

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