Harry Clarke was a Irish illustrator and stained glass artist, active in the early 20th Century, in the latter part of the Golden Age of Illustration.
As an illustrator, he is known in particular for his work for Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales and Edgar Allen Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination.
You can see the influence of earlier Golden Age greats like Edmund Dulac, Kay Nielsen and Aubrey Beardsley, but Clarke wove his influences into a unique and fascinating style. You can also see Clarke’s influence carried forward, for example in the work of contemporary comics artist and illustrator P. Craig Russell.
There is a particularly good resource of Clarke’s work on 50 Watts with excellently prepared images of his work, including his black and white Poe illustrations and a selection of detail crops from them, along with the text decorations and color plates.
There is also a wider selection of Clarke’s work, though with smaller images, on Grandma’s Graphics
[Obliquely via io9, (skip the FastCo Design link, it’s poorly presented)]
[Note: some of the images (particularly the Poe color plates) should be considered NSFW and not suitable for children.]
Grandma's Graphics
Project Gutenberg
Wikimedia Commons
Bio on BPIB
Bio on Wikipedia
Related Lines and Colors posts:
Edmund Dulac
Kay Nielsen
Aubrey Beardsley
Wow, that is some crazy amount of detail!
He won three gold medals and two scholarships, but even the film on his life and work, written and directed by John J. Doherty won an award. What an extra ordinary man Harry Clarke was.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATWj10GXY7Y
Thank you, Charley, for the introduction.
Thank you so much for this Charley. I used to copy this work as a youngster never really knowing anything about him.
That’s called love and patience. And in doing what he did, he passed on the same to other artist’s. Just charming…
I had luck to see his original pen&ink drawings in Dublin. They were nothing short of breathtaking.
Very inspirational, thank you.
Wow! Thank you for introducing me to his work. So rich in detail, and reminds me just a bit of the movie The Secret of Kells, perhaps the Irish influence?
The film kindly mentioned above by Aelle is called HARRY CLARKE – DARKNESS IN LIGHT.
It can be found here: http://www.camelproductions.net
Thanks
For the benefit of other readers, here is a direct link to information on the Harry Clarke film.
For the benefit of Camel Productions, — you might ask your website designer to bring your site into the 21st century and remove the frames so that individual pages can be linked to and bookmarked.