Harry Clarke – { 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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Harry Clarke’s Elixirs of Life

A magazine ad.

Of all the books illustrated by Harry Clarke the most scarce are a pair of slim volumes published 100 years ago by the Jameson distillery to promote their brand of Irish whiskey. The books were never widely distributed, being given away to distillery visitors. Copies of the illustrations were still hard to find in 2011 when I wrote a brief post about them. Collections of Clarke’s work seldom pay the books much attention beyond reproducing one or two drawings but by trawling the auction houses it’s now possible to accumulate most of the illustrations. With the ongoing interest in Clarke’s work I keep expecting Jameson to publish facsimile reprints but so far this doesn’t seem to have happened. The information below is taken from Harry Clarke: His Graphic Art (1983) by Nicola Gordon Bowe. A couple more illustrations from The History of a Great House may be found in Hiroshi Unno’s exceptional study, Harry Clarke – An Imaginative Genius in Illustrations and Stained-glass Arts.

The History of a Great House — Origin of John Jameson Whiskey, containing some Interesting Observations thereon together with the Causes of Its Present Scarcity. Printed by Maunsel and Roberts Ltd, Dublin 1924 for the distillers; 24 pp, 8 x 4.75 inches, 21 black line drawings blocked in with viridian, one repeated as an endpiece, custard paper cover (8 x 5 inches), printed with additional black and viridian drawing.

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Fire in the Blood: Harry Clarke

An all-too-short run through the biography of Harry Clarke, Fire in the Blood was made by Irish TV channel RTE in 2016 as part of a series devoted to the Celtic Revival. Camille O’Sullivan is the guide to Clarke’s life and work in a film which includes some commentary from Clarke expert Nicola Gordon Bowe, among others. 24 minutes isn’t enough time to cover the full range of the artist’s work but any Clarke documentary is better than none, and this one has a number of points in its favour. Clarke’s stained-glass windows are given a prominent place in the discussion, a reminder that stained-glass production was Clarke’s primary business even while his success as an illustrator increased. The stained-glass medium is an especially attractive one for a TV documentary—the colours of the windows glow on the screen in a manner they can never do on a page—and you could easily fill an hour with a discussion of Clarke’s remarkable glasswork alone. The end of the film includes some discussion about the scandal of Clarke’s last major work in the medium, the so-called Geneva Window, commissioned by the Irish government as a gift for the League of Nations then disowned when Clarke’s choice of subject (and the manner of its depiction) was deemed unsuitable. As with earlier objections to the work of Aubrey Beardsley, the complaints seem scarcely credible today but the window ended up being sold to an American collector.

On the illustration side we get to see pages from a little-known work of Clarke’s, the frame designs for the pages in Ireland’s Memorial Records, a multi-volume record of the names of Irish soldiers who died in the First World War. Nicola Gordon Bowe’s Clarke studies show the title page but seeing all the frames in print wasn’t possible until the publication of Harry Clarke’s War by Marguerite Helmers. The silhouettes of the soldiers embedded in each frame form a sequential narrative describing the progress of the war amid knotted borders that hark back to the page designs of the Book of Kells.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Harry Clarke’s illustrated Swinburne
• 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

British Book Illustration – Yesterday and To-day

The “to-day” in the title is a sign that this volume dates from the years before the Second World War when the hyphenated “today” was still a common sight. British Book Illustration – Yesterday and To-day was published in 1923, one of many such books produced by The Studio magazine. Studio editor Geoffrey Holme is also credited as editor of the book which follows the history of British illustration from Thomas Bewick, in 1795, to Randolph Schwabe in 1923, with each artist being represented by one or two pieces considered to exemplify their work. (Harry Clarke, who appears near the end, was Irish but the newly-minted Irish Free State was only a year old at this time so Clarke had technically been a Briton for most of his life.) Being a Studio publication, each illustration includes a note of the medium used (pen, wood engraving, etc), something you don’t always see in books of this kind. A lengthy introductory essay by Malcolm C. Salaman examines the work of each artist in turn. Two hundred pages isn’t anything like enough to do justice to the subject, and I could quibble over many of the selections, as well as the omissions. But the book is worthwhile for some of its unusual choices as well as showing drawings by artists who weren’t as well known as Beardsley and company. Among the unusual selections is the original drawing for The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar that Harry Clarke produced for his Poe collection. This was rejected by Harrap for being too horrible even though it accurately depicts the moments from the end of the story. The drawing is much more detailed than the one that replaced it but you don’t see the first version reproduced very often. Looking at it again it occurs to me that it really ought to be included in future editions of Clarke’s Poe illustrations.

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Harry Clarke’s illustrated Swinburne

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.

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