In today’s post, the Ur-text of Harry Clarke studies by the late Nicola Gordon Bowe. The book was published by Ireland’s Dolmen Press in 1983, and is difficult to find in fine condition for under £50; I was fortunate on both counts. In addition to a detailed biography the book contains many drawings for magazines and smaller publications which have seldom been reproduced elsewhere, together with works like the illustration below, intended for the Clarke-illustrated edition of Swinburne’s poetry but suppressed by the publisher. File next to The Life and Work of Harry Clarke (1989), Nicola Gordon Bowe’s continuation of the scholarship begun here.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Harry Clarke and others in The Studio
• Harry Clarke’s Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
• Harry Clarke in colour
• The Tinderbox
• Harry Clarke and the Elixir of Life
• Cardwell Higgins versus Harry Clarke
• Modern book illustrators, 1914
• Illustrating Poe #3: Harry Clarke
• Strangest Genius: The Stained Glass of Harry Clarke
• Harry Clarke’s stained glass
• Harry Clarke’s The Year’s at the Spring
• The art of Harry Clarke, 1889–1931
As absurd as it sounds another illustrator in fair need of contemporary rediscovery is Sidney Sime. He lives on in editions of Lord Dunsany’s work of course but the two books surveying his career of which I’m aware were both published forty years ago and are long out of print.
Yes, Sime seldom receives much attention outside weird fiction circles. I think being so firmly wedded to Lord Dunsany was a mistake for his longevity when Dunsany’s fiction is too eccentric to ever gain more than a cult readership. Harry Clarke’s choice of Poe as a subject for his illustration was a better bet for the future. And in Clarke’s case it also helps that his Poe illustrations are pretty much definitive. Mark at Strange Attractor has mentioned a desire to publish a book of Sime’s work, something that may still happen one day.