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Harry Clarke (tomorrow)!

Harry Patrick Clarke (17 March 1889 – 6 January 1931) was an Irish stained-glass artist and book illustrator. Born in Dublin, he was a leading figure in the Irish Arts and Crafts Movement.
 
Harry Clarke was born in Dublin, Ireland, on 17th March 1889. He was a leading artist of the Irish Arts and Crafts Movement, as well as the ‘Golden Age of Illustration‘. His work was influenced by both the Art Nouveau and Art Deco movements. His stained glass was particularly informed by the French Symbolist movement.
 
The son of a craftsman, Harry Clarke was exposed to art (and in particular Art Nouveau) at an early age. He went to school at Belvedere College, and by his late teens was studying stained glass at the Dublin Art School. While there, his The Consecration of St Mel, Bishop of Longford, by St Patrick won the gold medal for stained glass work in the 1910 ‘Board of Education National Competition’.
 
After completing his education, Clarke moved to London to seek work as an artist. He won commissions to work on illustrations for new editions of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, but completed neither of them. As it turned out, his first completed work was sixteen color plates and twenty-four monotone illustrations for Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen (1916).
 
Clarke’s next endeavor was a series of illustrations for an edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1919) and then The Years at the Spring (1920) containing twelve color plates and more than fourteen monotone images. The first version of Tales of Mystery and Imagination contained 24 black & white illustrations, while a second edition with eight color plates and 24 halftone images was published in 1923. This 1923 edition made his reputation as a book illustrator, during the golden age of gift-book illustration in the first quarter of the twentieth century and was followed by editions of Charles Perrault’s Fairy Tales of Perrault (1922), and Goethe’s Faust (1925), containing eight color plates and more than seventy monotone and duotone images. The last of these is considered his masterwork – and largely prefigures the disturbing yet colorful imagery of 1960s psychedelia.
 
Clarke’s timing could not have been more perfect, as he was working as an illustrator just as the golden-age of gift-book illustration was taking off (in the first quarter of the twentieth century). His work can be compared to other masters of the craft such as Arthur Rackham, Kay Nielsen and Virginia Frances Sterrett.

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David Brass Rare Books is pleased to offer the following
copy of Clarke's Fairy Tales by Hans Andersen...
 
The Rarest of All Harry Clarke's
Signed Limited Editions

[CLARKE, Harry, illustrator]. ANDERSEN, Hans Christian. Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen. Illustrated by Harry Clarke. London: George G. Harrap & Company, [1916].

Edition De Luxe limited to 125 copies signed by Harry Clarke (this being No. 42).

Large quarto (11 1/8 x 7 5/8 inches; 283 x 194 mm.). 319, [1] pp. Sixteen mounted color plates (all with captioned tissue guards), twenty-four black and white plates, and ten decorative tail-pieces, mostly repeated throughout the text. Additional line drawings for the frontispiece, title-page, list of illustrations, self-portrait tail-piece, and “The Tinder-Box” title-piece.

Publisher's white vellum over boards, front cover and spine decoratively stamped and lettered in gilt, top edge gilt, others uncut. Scattered light foxing throughout not affecting any of the color or black and white plates. Aside from the foxing this is a fine copy, with the the gilt decoration on the vellum covers bright and fresh. 

The rarest of all the Harry Clarke signed limited editions.

"Harrap published Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales in a limited, signed and numbered edition of 125 copies, bound in vellum and printed on rag paper, at 3 guineas for circulation in England and America… Harrap's prospectus introduced Harry Clarke as… “Mr. Clarke brings to Hans Andersen an entirely fresh interpretation, and he appeals to the intellectual emotions of art-lovers, who will find in his work satisfaction of their craving for new and unconventional treatment of themes which may never be exhausted while the spirit of life exists in art. Mr. Clarke is a craftsman who devotes to each drawing an infinity of pains which is little less than marvelous, and it is difficult to know which to admire most—his fresh conceptions or his delicate and intricate detail. The latter feature, by the way, has necessitated a very considerable amount of hand-graving upon the colour blocks, and these give, therefore, much more than the usual mechanical reproductions of the artist’s drawings… In all the book contains Forty full-page illustrations and a number of Decorative Tailpieces, etc. There are Sixteen Colour Plates, in which the colouring is as rich and original as would be expected from an artist whose black line work is as suggestive of riotous colouring as it is of ideas… The letter-press comprises 24 of the choicest stories of Andersen."" (Prospectus, quoted in Bowe on p. 40).

Bowe, p. 149, no. 2; Douglas Hyde Gallery. Harry Clarke Monograph, No. 27.


DB 04878
$9,500

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