Harry clarke (continued)

Clarke drew 40 full-page illustrations for the lavish, vellum-bound limited edition of just 125 copies of Andersen’s children’s classic of which 16 were in colour. Most of these were destroyed when the London offices of the British publisher George Harrap & Co were bombed during the Second World War.

However some survived because they had been taken to the United States. Clarke himself wrote that in 1925 Brentano’s, Harrap’s publishing partners in New York, took “my originals for Hans Andersen…..and they were shown in their bookshop in Fifth Avenue.”  It is also known that Byrne Hackett, owner of the Brick Row Bookshop in New York, used to buy and exhibit the Irishman’s original work.

It is not clear whether the ten pictures to be exhibited by The Fine Art Society were sold by Brentano’s or by Hackett but they passed into the hands of American collectors during the late 1920s. Since then they have only been seen once in public in an exhibition in a little-known museum in Kentucky in the mid-1990s and have survived in perfect condition. Only two other original Clarke colour illustrations for Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales have appeared on the market in recent years.

Clarke was born in Ireland in 1889 and studied at Dublin Metropolitan School of Art before travelling to London in 1913 to look for work as a book illustrator. He was rebuffed by eleven publishers but George Harrap recalled that he “took this Irish genius to his heart” on his first visit to his office with a portfolio of drawings and decided to employ him. However his new career started badly when he failed to complete two commissions, on one occasion because his illustrations were destroyed during the 1916 Easter Uprising.

Despite these setbacks Harrap remained loyal to him and commissioned him to produce illustrations for three editions of Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales, including the de luxe one. Strongly influenced by the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Clarke worked assiduously taking about four days to produce each black and white illustration and a week for a coloured one. Even by the standards of an age in which some of the best book illustrators of the century were at their peak, Clarke’s jewel-like miniaturist technique produced spectacularly beautiful results.

The works to be exhibited at The Fine Art Society, all in pen and ink and watercolour heightened with bodycolour,  include The Wild Swan, The Snow Queen, The Travelling Companion and The Garden of Paradise. All have inscriptions by Clarke written in pencil on the reverse.

Clarke, who was an immensely talented creator of stained glass as well as a book illustrator, was plagued by ill-health during the last years of his life and died of tuberculosis in Switzerland in 1931 aged just 41.
 

The Wild Swan