{"id":21004,"date":"2021-10-27T16:45:58","date_gmt":"2021-10-27T15:45:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=21004"},"modified":"2021-10-27T16:48:26","modified_gmt":"2021-10-27T15:48:26","slug":"martin-van-maeles-illustrated-poe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2021\/10\/27\/martin-van-maeles-illustrated-poe\/","title":{"rendered":"Martin van Ma\u00eble’s illustrated Poe"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"poe01.jpg\"<\/p>\n

I’ve waited months to write about this book in the run-up to Halloween. Several years ago I wrote a series of pre-Halloween posts about the illustrators of Edgar Allan Poe, with the final entry containing a lone illustration for The Tell-Tale Heart<\/em> by Martin van Ma\u00eble (1863\u20131926). At the time van Ma\u00eble’s book was unavailable online so I was left to wonder what the rest of his illustrations might be like. Dix contes d’Edgar Poe<\/em><\/a> (1912) is the volume in question, a collection of moody full-page illustrations plus many small vignettes, all of them engraved on wood by Eug\u00e8ne D\u00e9t\u00e9.<\/p>\n

\"poe02.jpg\"<\/p>\n

I’d been familiar with several other pieces from this book for many years without knowing their origin thanks to their appearance in the 1986 Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural<\/em><\/a>, an excellent guide edited by Jack Sullivan with a minor deficiency in that many of the illustrations are uncredited. (They did credit van Ma\u00eble for two of his pictures but spelled his name as “van Mo\u00eble” which doesn’t help.) The startling picture of a skeleton pushing a shrouded woman back into her tomb\u2014which I now know is van Ma\u00eble’s portrait of Madeline Usher\u2014was one of the uncredited drawings, as was the vignette of another skeleton holding a heart like a ticking pendulum (The Tell-Tale Heart<\/em> again). There are many more skeletons in this book. Van Ma\u00eble’s illustrations oscillate between two pictorial extremes, from shadow-filled realism in the full-page drawings to Dor\u00e9-like spot illustrations that suit Poe’s fatalism and macabre sense of humour. It’s a shame that many of these reproductions are darker than they should be, being from the old series of Gallica scans which remove all the grey tones from the images, but at least we can see the book as a whole. My thanks again to Mr TjZ for alerting me to this!<\/p>\n

\"poe03.jpg\"<\/p>\n

The Tell-Tale Heart.<\/em><\/p>\n

Van Ma\u00eble might be better known today if more of the books he illustrated had been suitable for a general audience. In a reversal of the usual state of affairs most of his illustrated editions are the classic works of erotic literature by Apuleius, Choderlos de Laclos, Anatole France et al, plus obscure works devoted to le vice Anglais<\/em>, while his non-erotic titles by Poe and Conan Doyle are in the minority. If he had a flair for the erotic then he also had a flair for the macabre. Some of his erotic drawings manage to combine the two, notably in La Grande Danse Macabre des Vifs<\/em> (1905), a portfolio which approaches F\u00e9licien Rops by bringing to erotic art a quality of imagination that would usually be rejected for distracting from the primary purpose of pornographic imagery. Wikipedia<\/a> has this and many more of van Ma\u00eble’s erotic illustrations.<\/p>\n

\"poe04.jpg\"<\/p>\n

The Tell-Tale Heart.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"poe05.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Hop-Frog.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"poe06.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Silence.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"poe07.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Silence.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"poe08.jpg\"<\/p>\n

The Devil in the Belfry.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"poe09.jpg\"<\/p>\n

The Fall of the House of Usher.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"poe10.jpg\"<\/p>\n

The Fall of the House of Usher.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"poe11.jpg\"<\/p>\n

The Cask of Amontillado.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"poe12.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Ligeia.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"poe13.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Ligeia.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"poe14.jpg\"<\/p>\n

King Pest.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"poe15.jpg\"<\/p>\n

King Pest.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"poe16.jpg\"<\/p>\n

End piece.<\/em><\/p>\n

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 The illustrators archive<\/a><\/p>\n

Previously on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 Narraciones extraordinarias by Edgar Allan Poe<\/a>
\n\u2022 Fritz Eichenberg\u2019s illustrated Poe<\/a>
\n\u2022 The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope<\/a>
\n\u2022 Hugo Steiner-Prag\u2019s illustrated Poe<\/a>
\n\u2022 Burt Shonberg\u2019s Poe paintings<\/a>
\n\u2022 Illustrating Poe #5: Among the others<\/a>
\n\u2022 Illustrating Poe #4: Wilfried S\u00e4tty<\/a>
\n\u2022 Illustrating Poe #3: Harry Clarke<\/a>
\n\u2022 Illustrating Poe #2: William Heath Robinson<\/a>
\n\u2022 Illustrating Poe #1: Aubrey Beardsley<\/a>
\n\u2022 Poe at 200<\/a>
\n\u2022 The Tell-Tale Heart from UPA<\/a>
\n\u2022 William Heath Robinson\u2019s illustrated Poe<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve waited months to write about this book in the run-up to Halloween. Several years ago I wrote a series of pre-Halloween posts about the illustrators of Edgar Allan Poe, with the final entry containing a lone illustration for The Tell-Tale Heart by Martin van Ma\u00eble (1863\u20131926). At the time van Ma\u00eble’s book was unavailable … Continue reading “Martin van Ma\u00eble’s illustrated Poe”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"New blog post: Martin van Ma\u00eble's illustrated Poe","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,30,42,22,48],"tags":[2346,93,1894,1202,9795,1893],"class_list":["post-21004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-black-white","category-books","category-horror","category-illustrators","tag-charles-baudelaire","tag-edgar-allan-poe","tag-eugene-dete","tag-felicien-rops","tag-jack-sullivan","tag-martin-van-maele"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-5sM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21004\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}