Symbolism and modernism in Harry Clarke’s literary illustrations

Abstract

This paper examines the work of Irish artist Harry Clarke (1889-1931), aiming to show the specificity of the symbolist and decadent aspects in his literary illustrations, marked by the influence of the English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley and directly linked to the nationalist context of the Irish Revival and the Irish Arts and Crafts Movement. As an illustrator, Clarke created visual interpretations of literary works that are essential to the Symbolist movement in the English language, such as The rime of the ancient mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Tales of mystery and imagination by Edgar Allan Poe, including the nationalist and medievalizing early poetry of William Butler Yeats. On the other hand, setting himself apart from Yeats’s prophetic symbolism, Clarke also illustrated works that problematized the nationalist dimension of the Irish Revival, such as the polemic play The playboy of the western world by John Millington Synge. The analysis of the relationships between the illustrations, the literary works and their cultural context characterize Harry Clarke’s work as a manifestation of a late decadentism in which distinctly modernist aspects are brought forth, as shown in the deforming and eerie images created for the 1925 edition of Goethe’s Faust.