GLOBALLY ACCLAIMED illustrator PJ Lynch accurately summed up the art of Harry Clarke when he said that none of his pictures or drawings had ever made him want to read the work he was illustrating.
“I prefer to look at the pictures,” said Mr Lynch, whose approach tends more towards realism than fantasy, speaking at the National Gallery of Ireland on Saturday.
Clarke’s symbolist pictures are so exciting that it is easy to forget the actual stories, although in the case of his 1916 illustrations for Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen, the stories stand equal with the fabulous images, 11 of which, including The Little Mermaid; The Snow Queen, and The Nightingale, are part of the gallery’s collection.
Mr Lynch mentioned the influence of Aubrey Beardsley. He said the “wonderful age” of which Beardsley and Oscar Wilde were part had ended some years before Clarke, and yet traces lingered.
Mr Lynch assessed Clarke’s earliest works and explained how his style emerged. Clarke was only 27 when the Hans Christian Andersen book was published.
Earlier Clarke’s biographer, Dr Nicola Gordon Bowe, had presented a lively talk on the many images that connect Irish art and literature. The relevance of fairies, also known as the “little people”, continues to inspire respect and fear, she said.
She presented footage of Irish folklorist Eddie Lenihan recalling how he had campaigned for the protection of a fairy bush threatened with destruction during motorway construction in Co Clare.
Dr Jarlath Killeen of Trinity College addressed the contrasting attitudes towards folklore. Initially regarded as an extension of the subject that intrigued gentlemen antiquarians, it was at times viewed as something associated with uneducated rural populations, “the old or the very young”.
Dr Róisín Kennedy of University College Dublin, an authority on Jack B Yeats, considered fantasy versus reality in Irish art and made effective use of Yeats’ The Country Shop (1912) in which both reality – in the form of a shopkeeper confronting her customer about an unpaid bill – and a man who appears to belong to another world and represents fantasy, all inhabit the same picture .
Dr Kennedy also spoke about Clarke’s controversial Geneva Window which was rejected by an Irish government.
Clarke who died in 1931, at 41, dominated the morning during which it was said that his illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1923) were more terrifying than the stories.
A fascinating subtext was provided by Dr Gordon Bowe’s reference to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s belief in the Cottingley Fairies. Sir Conan Doyle’s uncle was a director of the National Gallery of Ireland.
