Aholibah (1928).
You won’t find Harry Clarke’s illustration for Swinburne’s Aholibah in Selected Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne even though it was intended for the book, and was the illustration that Clarke deemed his favourite of the series. The erotic nature of the drawing was too much for the publisher so Clarke had to content himself by pasting a reproduction in his own copy. The copy above has been scanned from Nicola Gordon Bowe’s Harry Clarke: His Graphic Art; everything below is from the published Swinburne collection which turned up recently at the Internet Archive.
Selected Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne was Clarke’s last illustrated book, published in 1928, three years before his untimely death. Of all the major Clarke books that appeared during the artist’s lifetime it’s always been the most difficult to find. Some of the drawings have been reprinted in recent collections but never the book itself. As with Clarke’s Faust, the erotic and morbid qualities of the illustrations generated disquiet outside the publisher’s office, with Humbert Wolfe in the book’s introduction stating that Clarke’s interpretations were completely opposed to his own. Given the erotic and morbid preoccupations of the poet and his work this surprises me; Swinburne’s poetry was admired by Aleister Crowley and HP Lovecraft, among others. They weren’t reading him because he was writing paeans to daffodills.
My earlier mention of this volume included a link to a defunct blog with a collection of the illustrations separated from the text. This was unavoidable at the time, there wasn’t anywhere else that you could see all of them in one place. But seeing the illustrations with the poems benefits the drawings as well as the verse, especially when the poems themselves aren’t so familiar. For my part it’s also good to see all of the illustrations, being the owner of a first edition which I bought many years ago only to discover that a couple of the best pictures had been carefully removed with a razor. This is a common problem with old illustrated books. Caveat emptor as always.
Clarke didn’t do many double-page illustrations. This is one of his best.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• More Harry Clarke online
• Harry Clarke online
• Harry Clarke record covers
• Thomas Bodkin on Harry Clarke
• Harry Clarke: His Graphic Art
• 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
John, I have a trip planned this summer to visit some friends who live near Miami, Fl and I’ve already included a visit to the Wolfsonian/FIU museum to see the Geneva Window in my itinerary. I’ve looked forward to this for a very long time. The Window was withdrawn from display for a while because of construction but they’ve built it a new setting that looks fantastic on the museum website. Now it’s back!
This should be quite a roadtrip. On the way back I’m going to cross the peninsula and visit Estero, the site of the Koreshan Unity, now a park, home of the 19th century utopian community formed by Cyrus Teed, i.e., Koresh, who preached celibacy, sexual equality and that we all live inside a concave hollow earth!
Ah, lucky you. I’ve not seen any of Clarke’s windows in situ although I have the Strange Genius book which catalogues them all. The Geneva Window receives several pages going through the panels in turn. I think it may be the only one of Clarke’s works that includes a reference to James Joyce.
Easy hop over to Dublin for those in the UK who’d like to see Clarke’s glass (National Gallery Ireland, plus Hugh Lane gallery, + assorted churces), etc.) NGI has some of his designs for these too, http://onlinecollection.nationalgallery.ie/people/492/harry-clarke/objects.
Well worth the walk to the Hugh Lane Gallery for the Eve of St. Agnes glass.
This has always been my favourite Clarke book, far more so then the Poe and Goethe volumes. A pity it was never produced in a larger format. A feeling of decay and desecration missing from the other two pervades this volume…
i’ve long had this as one of my favorite books in my library (even though the binding is worn & the frontispiece written-in), & after much deliberation i’m beginning to think that clarke surpasses beardsley in the expressiveness of his faces.