Harry Clarke's illustrations for Edgar Allen Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination and Goethe's Faust

Suzanne Elizabeth Good
Trinity College Dublin
Department of History of Art and Architecture
2004
BA

Subject: Painting/ Stain Glass
Country: Ireland
Period: 20th Century

10,000 words

This dissertation focuses on the illustrations by Harry Clark of the two title works. It is divided into three clear sections, the first approaces Clark's varied artistic career, working between his family's Stain Glass workshop in Dublin, and his career as a successful illustrator, whose drawings were welcomed by an open-minded British public. Clarke chose each caption that he illustrated, rather than the editor, and so language is also significant in exploration of these works. His interest in the fantastic and the sublime is evident from his choices of illustrated passages. The author focuses secondly on Edgar Allen Poe's text, and how Clark's images are both striking and immediate, and in keeping with Poe's fixation on decay and mortality. Finally the dissertation focuses on Clarkes development of this style in illustrating Goethe's text, and his approach to the depiction of evil and all things sinister, without ever being gaudy or vulgar.

Irish Georgian Society

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Harry Clarke's illustrations for Edgar Allen Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination and Goethe's Faust