Harry Clarke’s illustrations for a 1923 edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination are visually arresting – beautiful, but also weird and disturbing.
What gets me about Clarke’s figures is their spidery nature, and those freakishly long fingers and toes…
The terrific site 50 Watts has all the black and white illustrations from this volume right here.
Strongly reminiscent of Aubrey Beardsley’s work, these illustrations are gorgeously macabre. Pre-goth, and pre-psychedelia. Harry Clarke (1889-1931) was an Irish artist important in the Arts and Crafts Movement. Clarke also illustrated Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen, Fairy Tales of Perrault, and Goethe’s Faust, but spent most of his time working in stained-glass.