Harry Clarke – Page 13 – { feuilleton }

William Heath Robinson’s illustrated Poe

Another gem from the Internet Archive collection of scans from North American libraries. This edition of the poems of Edgar Allan Poe from 1900 was illustrated by William Heath Robinson (1872–1944), an artist whose later drawings of quirky inventions have completely overshadowed his earlier books, as well as the work of his equally talented older brother, Charles. I’m probably in the minority in preferring Heath Robinson’s book illustration to his later works, and this edition of Poe is a superb example of his mastery of line and space. It can’t compete with Harry Clarke’s Poe, of course, but then neither can anything else. WHR wasn’t really suited to the darker side of literature but he acquits himself here far better than Arthur Rackham did when he attempted his own Poe collection in 1935.

• Bud Plant’s W Heath Robinson page
• W. Heath Robinson’s fairy tale illustrations

The Conqueror Worm.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Harry Clarke’s The Year’s at the Spring

The Internet Archive seems to be improving as a resource for out-of-copyright books. Browsing there this week it’s become apparent that a number of recent additions include rare illustrated titles which can be downloaded as PDFs or scanned pages. Project Gutenberg has the quantity where free books are concerned but their quality leaves much to be desired when it comes to illustrations. The nice thing about these scans from libraries is that they copy the complete book, including covers and endpapers. In many cases the covers have been spoiled by bar code stickers and other library ephemera but they still give a good idea of the original volume.

First of the discoveries is this poetry collection, The Year’s at the Spring (sic), from 1920 illustrated by the peerless Harry Clarke (1889–1931). Among the poets featured are WB Yeats, GK Chesterton, Rupert Brooke and Walter de la Mare. This really is a discovery for me since I don’t think I’ve seen any of the illustrations before. The drawings are certainly up to the standard of Clarke’s other work and the colour plates show a possible Japanese influence in some cases, as well as being reminiscent of the colour plates for his Poe volume. There are 21 full-page illustrations in all, with many vignettes.

A couple more illustration samples follow below the fold. I’ll be featuring other titles which have caught my eye over the next few days.

“I am born of a thousand storms, and grey with the rushing rains.”

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• My pastiches

The Age of Enchantment: Beardsley, Dulac and their Contemporaries

“Everything about her was white.” Illustration by Edmund Dulac for
The Dreamer of Dreams by Queen Marie of Roumania (1915).

A major exhibition of British fantasy illustration opens at the Dulwich Picture Gallery this Wednesday, running to February 17th, 2008. Considering the huge resurgence of popularity in fantasy for children I’m surprised none of the UK galleries have done this before now. The Dulwich organisers have chosen a suitably wintry picture by the wonderful Edmund Dulac to promote the exhibition which—intentionally or not—happens to look like a precursor of the poster art for The Golden Compass.

With the death of Aubrey Beardsley in 1898, the world of the illustrated book underwent a dramatic change. Gone were the degenerate images of scandal and deviance. The age of decadence was softened to delight rather than to shock. Whimsy and a pastel toned world of childish delights and an innocent exoticism unfolded in the pages of familiar fables, classic tales and those children’s stories like The Arabian Nights and Hans Andersens’ Stories. These were published with lavish colour plates and fine bindings: these were the coffee table books of a new age.

As a result a new generation of illustrators emerged. This new group of artists was intent upon borrowing from the past, especially the fantasies of the rococo, the rich decorative elements of the Orient, the Near East, and fairy worlds of the Victorians. The masters of this new art form were artists like Edmund Dulac and Kay Nielson, whose inventive book productions, with those of Arthur Rackham, became legendary. Disciples gathered, like Jessie King and Annie French, the Scottish masters of the ethereal and the poetic, the Detmold Brothers, masters of natural fantasy, as well as those who remained in Beardsley’s shadow: the warped yet fascinating works of Sidney Sime, a joyously eccentric coal-miner turned artist, Laurence Housman, master of the fairy tale, the precious inventions from the classics by Charles Ricketts, the Irish fantasies of Harry Clarke, himself a master of stained glass as well as the gift book, and the rich and exotic world of Alaistair. Children’s stories were transformed by the imaginations of a group still bowing to the Victorians Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway and the fairies of Richard Doyle but these were now given a more colourful intensity by Charles Robinson, Patten Wilson, Anning Bell, Bernard Sleigh and Maxwell Armfield.

The exhibition of British fantasy illustration will be the first such exhibition in Britain and the first worldwide for over 20 years (the last being in New York in 1979). All works, of which over 100 are planned, will come largely from British museums and private collections, many of these will never have been seen publicly before in Britain.

The exhibition is curated by Rodney Engen.

AS Byatt reviewed the exhibition for The Guardian and also looked at the sinister perversity underlying many of the Edwardian fairy tales.

• Edmund Dulac at Art Passions

Books by Queen Marie of Roumania:
• The Dreamer of Dreams (1915; illus: Edmund Dulac)
• The Stealers of Light (1916; illus: Edmund Dulac)
• Vom Wunder der Tränen (1938; illus: Sulamith Wülfing)

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Masonic fonts and the designer’s dark materials

The art of Jessie M King, 1875–1949

The Fisherman and His Soul : Her Feet were Naked
from A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde, 1915.

A delicate piece of Orientalism illustrating Wilde’s book of fairy tales. Jessie Marion King’s work is a fascinating amalgam of the decorative post-Beardsley style exemplified by Harry Clarke and the Glasgow Style of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Arts and Crafts movement. It’s unfortunate that her associations with Mackintosh sometimes overshadow her career as an illustrator despite her being as talented and productive as many of her male contemporaries.

The rest of the Wilde illustrations can be seen at Art Passions along with a number of other works.

• Jessie M King biography page

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

The art of Takato Yamamoto

Takato Yamamoto was born in Akita prefecture (Japan) in 1960. After graduating from the painting department of the Tokyo Zokei University, he experimented with the Ukiyo-e Pop style. He further refined and developed that style to create his “Heisei Esthiticism” style. His first exhibition was held in Tokyo, in 1998.

There’s much that’s superficially familiar in Takato Yamamoto’s art—“Boy’s Love” tableaux with fey young men in various states of undress mooning over each other, then the perennial Japanese obsession with naked women bound by ropes. But closer examination reveals a degree of finesse and imagination that elevates his work away from the porn ghetto into the rarified realm of Decadence (as if those favourite Symbolist themes of Saint Sebastian [above] and Salomé [below] weren’t enough of a clue). For a start the drawing style is a great amalgam of influences from Beardsley through to Harry Clarke by way of the finest Edwardian pornographer, Franz von Bayros. Then there’s the curious details of severed heads, claws, sundry bones and eyeballs which decorate the otherwise florid arrangements supporting the figures. So far there don’t appear to have been any books of Takato Yamamoto’s work produced in the west and it’s possible that the sexual content and grotesquery limits that possibility. But you can some galleries here, here and here. His official site is mostly Japanese and has to be navigated from an interior page since there seems to be a file missing from the index.

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