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| Antique print - Exquisite Illustration - “I would call aloud upon her name”
from “Ligeia” 1933A stunning image of one of Harry Clarke's superb illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe's macabre "Tales of Mystery and Imagination". The collection includes some of the most well-known and loved mystery tales of all time, including "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", "The Pit and the Pendulum", "The Premature Burial", "The Masque of the Red Death", "The Fall of the House of Usher", "Ligeia", "A Descent into the Maelstrom", "The Raven" among others. In the tradition of the House of Hammer films of the 1960s and 1970s, Roger Corman immortalised many of Poe's tales of madness and premature burial in film in the early sixties, featuring such actors as the magnificent Vincent Price, Ray Milland, Basil Rathbone and Peter Lorre.
Irish illustrator, Harry Clarke's (1889-1931) work was heavily influenced by the Art Nouveau movement, and together with Rackham, Neilsen and Dulac, he was one of the finest illustrators of his time. As with Aubrey Beardsley, with whom he is often compared, some of Clarke's finest work was in black and white. A vivid and often macabre imagination informs his work, and his illustrations from Poe are superb.In halls such as these -- in a bridal chamber such as this -- I passed, with the Lady of Tremaine, the unhallowed hours of the first month of our marriage -- passed them with but little disquietude. That my wife dreaded the fierce moodiness of my temper -- that she shunned me and loved me but little -- I could not help perceiving; but it gave me rather pleasure than otherwise. I loathed her with a hatred belonging more to demon than to man. My memory flew back, (oh, with what intensity of regret!) to Ligeia, the beloved, the august, the beautiful, the entombed. I revelled in recollections of her purity, of her wisdom, of her lofty, her ethereal nature, of her passionate, her idolatrous love. Now, then, did my spirit fully and freely burn with more than all the fires of her own. In the excitement of my opium dreams (for I was habitually fettered in the shackles of the drug) I would call aloud upon her name, during the silence of the night, or among the sheltered recesses of the glens by day, as if, through the wild eagerness, the solemn passion, the consuming ardor of my longing for the departed, I could restore her to the pathway she had abandoned -- ah, could it be forever? -- upon the earth. A stunning illustration from “Ligeia” absolutely exquisite detail.
Clarke's fantastical, macabre, and often disturbing illustrations for Poe's work, never shy away from the morbid side of the tales, and if any images of death, decay, madness and obsession, can be said to be exquisite, then these are they - some of the best to be found and they made his reputation as a book illustrator during the golden age of gift-book illustration in the early twentieth century.
Clarke's work has been compared to that of Aubrey Beardsley, Kay Nielsen, and Edmund Dulac but his images are unique and darkly powerful, suiting the tone of the tales perfectly.Mounted on a stunning jet black mount with a slight sheen. |
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