(click details above for larger images)
Via the QM, Golden Age Comic Book Stories, which includes some posts (photos above from this one) of very very cool work by Irish Arts & Crafts illustrator Harry Clarke:
The son of a craftsman, Joshua Clarke, Clarke the younger was exposed to art (and in particular Art Nouveau) at an early age. He went to school in Belvedere College in Dublin. By his late teens, he was studying stained glass at the Dublin Art School. While there his The Consecration of St. Mel, Bishop of Longford, by St. Patrick won the gold medal for stained glass work in the 1910 Board of Education National Competition.
Completing his education in his main field, Clarke travelled to London, where he sought employment as a book illustrator. Picked up by London publisher Harrap, he started with two commissions which were never completed: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (his work on which was destroyed during the 1916 Easter Uprising) and an illustrated edition of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock.
Difficulties with these projects made Hans Christian Andersen’s Andersen’s Fairy Tales his first printed work, however, in 1916. This was closely followed by an illustrations for an edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination.
Images above chosen for archenemy co-blogger and sailmeister JMD.