Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


"Faust"


illustrations by


Harry Clarke





 

Harry Clarke

(b Dublin, 17 March 1889; d Coire, Switzerland, 6 Jan 1931).

Draughtsman and designer, husband of Margaret Clarke. In 1905 he was apprenticed at the church decoration business of his father, Joshua Clarke, working with stained glass under William Nagle. In 1910 he won a scholarship to the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin to study stained glass under Alfred Child. In 1913 Clarke went to London where he was commissioned by the publishers George G. Harrap & Co. to illustrate a special edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales (1916). His decorative, whimsical style reflects the work of not only Aubrey Beardsley and Gustav Klimt but also such illustrators of fantastical work as Kai Neilsen and Léon Bakst, whose work he saw in London. Clarke later illustrated Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1919), the anthology The Year’s at the Spring (1920) and The Fairy Tales of Perrault (1922) for Harrap. In 1915 he received his first stained-glass commission for the Honan Collegiate Chapel, University College, Cork, which was completed in March 1917. His brilliant colouring and lush sensuous fantasy, even in sacred subjects, were very influential and often had a morbid bent. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1925 and Royal Hibernian Academician in 1926. He designed panels for Bewley’s Oriental Café (1927), Grafton Street, Dublin, and for private collectors. His most celebrated work is the Eve of St Agnes (Dublin, Hugh Lane Mun. Gal.), commissioned by Harold Jacob in 1924. His masterpiece, the Geneva Window (1929), commissioned by the Irish Government in 1927, depicts scenes from 20th-century Irish literature with daring originality. It was not accepted and was eventually loaned to the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin. In 1988 it was purchased by the Mitchell Wolfson jr Collection of Decorative and Propaganda Arts in Miami.