{illustrators} – { feuilleton }

Harry Clarke’s Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen

Six years ago I put together a post of links to online sources for all of Harry Clarke’s major works of illustration. His first illustrated book, Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, was among these but the best link I could find at the time was to a set of scans at Flickr which didn’t include things like the board illustrations. (And Flickr is a generally unstable host for anything.) The images here are from this page which was added recently to Wikimedia Commons, and are taken in turn from a collection of book scans at Maastricht University.

Clarke’s book of fairy tales was published by Harrap in 1916 but wasn’t intended to be his first illustrated edition. Harrap’s first commission had been for an edition of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner but the project was abandoned when most of the art was destroyed during Ireland’s Easter Uprising. Further plans for an edition of Pope’s The Rape of the Lock were also abandoned. Harrap’s decision to launch a new artist with yet another collection of Hans Christian Andersen stories seems surprising when there were already many fine editions for British book-buyers to choose from. The Robinson brothers—Thomas, Charles and William—had collaborated on a huge story collection published in 1899, with their individual contributions being subsequently repackaged as separate volumes. The same year saw another edition for which Helen Stratton provided over 400 illustrations. Edmund Dulac and Dugald Stewart Walker had produced books of their own by the time Clarke’s edition was being prepared, and there were others besides these.

Clarke’s collection has more stories than some of those illustrated by his contemporaries but his art is also a little less assured than it would be in his later books. As a fairy-tale collection it lacks the delicate touch he brought to his illustrated edition of Perrault’s tales. There are many excellent compositions, especially among the black and white drawings but also a few pieces which aren’t so much composed as filled with competing areas of decoration that overwhelm the subject of the picture. Clarke never abandoned his fondness for minute details but in his later books his arrangements of tiny circles and baroque curlicues are much more successful.

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Weekend links 846

Design by Randoll Coate for the Labirinto Borges, a hedge maze at the Giorgio Cini Foundation, Venice, which was renovated earlier this year.

• “Code was probably our most overtly political record, which is interesting, touring and playing it in these very different but scary political times.” Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire talking about the experience of touring America again.

• At The Daily Heller: A look at the work of designer/illustrator George Hardie whose five-decade career is to be celebrated in a retrospective exhibition in London. There’s more George Hardie here.

• “Almost as soon as weird began circulating outside of Macbeth, its meaning broadened too, from ‘eerie’ and ‘uncanny’ to ‘odd’ or ‘unusual’.” Colin Gorrie on the weird history of the word “weird”.

• At The Quietus: Toby Manning on 40 years of Gone To Earth by David Sylvian. A minor nitpick: the album’s art and design was by Russell Mills, not Vaughan Oliver.

• New music: Burning Song by Kali Malone; Obsessive Surrealism by Parallel Worlds.

• At Door Of Perception: The radical architectural designs of Eugene Tssui.

• DJ Food’s latest accumulation of psychedelic graphics from the desktop.

• Old music: When The Music’s Over (Live, 1970) by The Doors.

• Arthur Brown‘s favourite songs.

• Weird Dream (1976) by Harmonia | It’s So Weird (1983) by Bush Tetras | Ballad Of The Weird Sisters (2013) by Blood Ceremony

Paul Woodroffe’s Tempest

Paul Vincent Woodroffe (1875–1954) was a British illustrator and stained-glass artist, a kind of British equivalent of Harry Clarke in that he seems to have spent more time creating stained glass than he did illustrating books. Woodroffe was also an exact contemporary of Aubrey Beardsley, and both artists provided illustrations in 1897 for The Parade, a heavily-illustrated gift book of stories for children. I’ve known about Woodroffe’s illustrated Tempest for some time but I’ve had to wait to find a decent collection of all the colour plates. Woodroffe was an excellent watercolourist whose nebulous effects are so delicate they might easily be spoiled by poor reproduction. I’m at a loss to say exactly how some of these effects were achieved. He evidently used washes to fill in the sky, a technique where the paint can’t be manipulated before it dries, yet he still has the translucent figures of Ariel and Prospero hovering over some of the scenes. What he seems to have done is painted the transparent figures in very diluted white tones over the backgrounds, a difficult process when you don’t want any pencil outlines showing underneath.

Where the subtance of the text is concerned, Woodroffe adds more to some of the familiar scenes than you find with other artists. For the scene where Ariel is transformed into a harpy Edmund Dulac shows the spirit as an eagle-sized bird; Woodroffe’s Ariel is a larger creature with a fearsome pair of claws. For Ariel’s Song he shows a cowled and enthroned skeletal figure sitting at the bottom of the sea, like Death waiting to make an appearance in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Woodroffe’s human figures are less interesting although still well-drawn, a parade of statuesque types with similar faces and a distinctly Pre-Raphaelite appearance. His book also features three double-page scenes, something you don’t find so often in these coloured editions.

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Weekend links 842

An illustration by Charles Keeping for The Golden Shadow.

• At the BFI: Alex Ramon selects 10 great British TV shows of 1976. (And 50 years ago the American term “shows” was most often applied to the variety format. We would have called these “programmes”.)

• Illustrations by Charles Keeping for The Golden Shadow (1973), a retelling of Greek myths and legends by Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen.

• All The Devils are here: Ken Russell’s controversial masterpiece will return to cinemas in its restored, definitive form in October.

• The Strange World of…The Cramps. Related: The Cramps on The Tube 1986, full 20-minute performance unedited.

• New music: Olùsìn (Worshippers) by Ibukun Sunday; The Will of Tongues by Sarah Davachi.

• In a previously unavailable performance, Can play Halleluhwah on Beat-Club in 1971.

• The first Polish Culture UK Podcast is an introduction to Żuławski’s cinema.

• Mix of the week is DreamScenes – August 2026 at Ambientblog.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Zinkraft.

• The Geologic Atlas of the Moon.

• Xerox Hell

• Golden Hair (1970) by Syd Barrett | The Golden Vibe (Alternative Mix) (1977) by Steve Hillage | Golden Ball (1993) by Stereolab

BWS and REH

Since Barry Windsor-Smith was absent from the previous post (or there in spirit via the pages of The Studio) I thought I’d post a few of his prints from the mid-70s. As I said in the Snaps piece, Smith and co. set up The Studio in order to concentrate on art that was creator-owned and free of the constraints they were forced to work under in the comics field. This didn’t mean that they completely abandoned the subjects which had made them popular artists. Barry Smith’s work for his own Gorblimey Press oscillated between pastiches of the 19th-century artists he admired—mainly Alphonse Mucha and the Pre-Raphaelites—and characters from the stories of Robert E. Howard, Conan in particular.

Solomon Kane (1975).

Smith’s work with Roy Thomas on the first run of Marvel’s Conan comics had given him access to a large audience of comic readers. Not all of these would have wanted to buy (or been able to afford) the Gorblimey Press run of signed and numbered prints but it made sense for Smith to offer some continuation with the previous phase of his career. My animus towards the Marvel comics format means I have little affection for the Smith and Thomas Conan comics. But it’s interesting watching Smith’s work there evolve within the restrictions of the production-line system when you know he’ll end up presenting a very different version of Conan and Howard’s other characters in his prints.

Bran Mak Morn (1975).

Most of the pieces here are from the Gorblimey Robert E. Howard portfolio, a collection of five prints presenting portraits of characters from Howard’s stories. Smith included three of these—Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn and Thoth Amon—in his section of The Studio.

Thoth Amon (1975).

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