Notable illustrated books may have suffered from the separation of their images for framing and resale, but several intriguing instances still exist. Harry Clarke, celebrated for his stained-glass artwork, also made great strides in the field of print. His illustrations for Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales in 1916 brought joy to children, and he further explored the darker depths of his creative prowess with his drawings for Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, introduced in 1919, roughly seven decades posthumously. His illustrations offered a wonderfully eerie contrast to narratives like The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and The Pit and the Pendulum. A copy of the first edition can be obtained for €650 from Ulysses Rare Books.
While Clarke’s illustrations for Goethe’s Faust, published in 1925, are lesser known, they trod the path laid by French artist Eugene Delacroix a hundred years earlier. When Goethe, who passed away in 1832, saw Delacroix’s illustrations, he acknowledged the artist’s “more superior imagination”, conceding that Delacroix had outdone his own visions in specific scenes. Clarke’s depictions, presented in colour and monochrome, take an even grander leap. A first-edition of the English version translated by John Anster, enriched with Clarke’s illustrations and carrying his autograph, is available at De Búrca Rare Books for €1,250.
From a rather extraordinary lineage comes illustrator Richard Doyle, whose father was the Irish political cartoonist John Doyle, and his brother being Henry Doyle, the inaugural director of the National Gallery of Ireland. The family roster also notably includes his nephew, Arthur Conan Doyle, the originator of Sherlock Holmes. Intriguingly, despite Sherlock Holmes’s methodical and meticulous approach to solving crimes, Conan Doyle exhibited a keen interest in the realm of fairies, and was duped by the notorious Cottingley Fairies scam when he publicised photos of “fairies”, fabricated by two adolescent girls using paper cutouts and hatpins.
Elise Wright and Frances Griffiths, two young girls residing in Cottingley near Bradford within the UK, coined the first imagery of fairies in 1917. At the time, Elise was aged 16 and Frances was only nine. The five provocative images, published in a Strand Magazine article by Conan Doyle in 1920, sparked much fascination before their allure gradually faded by the early 1980s. This is when the creators open-heartedly confessed to concocting the images, although Frances insisted that the final photograph was, indeed, real.
Perhaps Conan Doyle was swayed by the enigmatic elements present in his uncle’s musings. His uncle Richard Doyle, although untrained in art, was a highly lauded illustrator, best remembered for his illumination of works by Charles Dickens and the Grimms brothers. Rather distinctively, an illustration series by Richard named In Fairyland: A Series of Pictures from the Elf World led to the conception of a poem to accompany it, commissioned by publishers Longman, Green, Reader, and Dyer. Irish correspondent William Allingham was tasked to create this piece, highly recognised for penning down The Faeries. This combined work was first published in 1870. In our current day, you can find original samples in esteemed establishments, such as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. A second edition of Ulysses from 1875 is available for €895, and De Búrca prints are on the market for €375 in very good condition.