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Auction archive: Lot number 54

ILLUSTRATION TO JOHN KEAT'S POEM, THE EVE OF ST. AGNES Harry Clarke RHA (1889-1931)

Important Irish Art
29 Nov 2010
Opening
€8,000 - €10,000
ca. US$10,928 - US$13,660
Price realised:
€15,500
ca. US$21,174
Auction archive: Lot number 54

ILLUSTRATION TO JOHN KEAT'S POEM, THE EVE OF ST. AGNES Harry Clarke RHA (1889-1931)

Important Irish Art
29 Nov 2010
Opening
€8,000 - €10,000
ca. US$10,928 - US$13,660
Price realised:
€15,500
ca. US$21,174
Beschreibung:

ILLUSTRATION TO JOHN KEAT'S POEM, THE EVE OF ST. AGNES Harry Clarke RHA (1889-1931)
Medium: pencil, pen and ink and watercolour on Bristol board Dimensions: 36 by 27cm., 14.2 5 by 10.5in. (Including dense black 2cm. thick frame painted by the artist around the illustration) painted by the artist around the illustration) Provenance: Provenance:Purchased by the present owner at Sotheby's, London, early 1980s Literature: Gordon Bowe, Nicola, Harry Clarke Monograph and Catalogue, published to accompany, ‘Harry Clarke’ exhibition, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin, 1979 Gordon Bowe, Nicola, The Life and Work of Harry Clarke Dublin, 1989 Moore Steenson, Martin, A Bibliographical Checklist of the Work of Harry Clarke London, 2003 Gordon Bowe, Nicola, ‘Harry Clarke’s Illustrations for Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales’ in Harry Clarke 1889-1931: Ten Original Illustrations for Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales, London, 2008. “They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall; Like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide; Where lay the Porter, in uneasy sprawl, With a huge empty flaggon by his side: The wakeful bloodhound rose... e, and shook his hide, But his sagacious eye an inmate owns: By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide: - The chains lie silent on the footworn stones; - The key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans.” Harry Clarke’s fertile imagination was ideally suited to Keats’ sensuous poetic narrative, steeped as it is in “the romantic atmosphere of love and religious ritual”. Among a number of writers the young artist specially noted down in his 1914 diary were Keats, Poe, Goethe, Ronsard, Villon, Flaubert, Coleridge and Synge – all of whose works he was to subsequently illustrate during his tragically short working life, either in special edition illustrated books or in stained glass panels. The previous year, aged 24, he had made two illustrations of Keats’ poems – the illustration featured here, to The Eve of St. Agnes, and another of similar scale to La Belle Dame sans Merci, as part of the portfolio he prepared to take round prospective publishers in London after he had left the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art as a prize-winning student in the summer of 1913. Although neither was ever published, along with a number of others illustrating Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allen Poe, Hans Christian Andersen and W.B. Yeats, for example, they were responsible for securing his first book illustrating commission, from the London publisher George Harrap. Keats’ name also features among his favourite authors in the pile of books depicted in the bookplate he drew for his first major patron, the Epicurean Dublin stockbroker and bibliophile Laurence A. Waldron, during this period. And of course, ten years later, in 1923, Clarke would embark on his secular masterpiece, the twenty two small stained glass panels illustrating The Eve of St. Agnes, the “revel in blue” he made into a window for the staircase of the Jacob family’s residence, St. Michael’s, on the corner of Ailesbury Road, Dublin (now in the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane). This surprisingly large, detailed work uses a miniaturist’s technique to illustrate the penultimate stanza of Keats’ evocative poem, in which the thwarted lovers escape from their warring families in the wintery night of auspicious St. Agnes’ Eve. With full artistic licence, Clarke depicts “thoughtful Madeline” poised apprehensively on tiny slippered feet. Exquisitely coiffed and tiara’d, she is modishly made up, diaphanously swathed in a veiled scarf and vogueishly dressed in an exquisitely embroidered chiffon ballgown – despite the “bitter chill” and storm that awaits her outside her family’s baronial fortress. She is framed by the billowing satin-lined cloak of her “impassion’d” lover, Porphyro, dressed in signature Clarke chequered skull cap, peacock feather and cape. The spiky fingers of his right hand hover around her willowy waist while the other points the way forward to their life together beyond the huge castle door. Theatrically made-up and wearing black

Auction archive: Lot number 54
Auction:
Datum:
29 Nov 2010
Auction house:
Whyte & Sons Auctioneers Ltd
Molesworth Street 38
Dublin 2
Ireland
info@whytes.ie
+353 (0)1 676 2888
Beschreibung:

ILLUSTRATION TO JOHN KEAT'S POEM, THE EVE OF ST. AGNES Harry Clarke RHA (1889-1931)
Medium: pencil, pen and ink and watercolour on Bristol board Dimensions: 36 by 27cm., 14.2 5 by 10.5in. (Including dense black 2cm. thick frame painted by the artist around the illustration) painted by the artist around the illustration) Provenance: Provenance:Purchased by the present owner at Sotheby's, London, early 1980s Literature: Gordon Bowe, Nicola, Harry Clarke Monograph and Catalogue, published to accompany, ‘Harry Clarke’ exhibition, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin, 1979 Gordon Bowe, Nicola, The Life and Work of Harry Clarke Dublin, 1989 Moore Steenson, Martin, A Bibliographical Checklist of the Work of Harry Clarke London, 2003 Gordon Bowe, Nicola, ‘Harry Clarke’s Illustrations for Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales’ in Harry Clarke 1889-1931: Ten Original Illustrations for Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales, London, 2008. “They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall; Like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide; Where lay the Porter, in uneasy sprawl, With a huge empty flaggon by his side: The wakeful bloodhound rose... e, and shook his hide, But his sagacious eye an inmate owns: By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide: - The chains lie silent on the footworn stones; - The key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans.” Harry Clarke’s fertile imagination was ideally suited to Keats’ sensuous poetic narrative, steeped as it is in “the romantic atmosphere of love and religious ritual”. Among a number of writers the young artist specially noted down in his 1914 diary were Keats, Poe, Goethe, Ronsard, Villon, Flaubert, Coleridge and Synge – all of whose works he was to subsequently illustrate during his tragically short working life, either in special edition illustrated books or in stained glass panels. The previous year, aged 24, he had made two illustrations of Keats’ poems – the illustration featured here, to The Eve of St. Agnes, and another of similar scale to La Belle Dame sans Merci, as part of the portfolio he prepared to take round prospective publishers in London after he had left the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art as a prize-winning student in the summer of 1913. Although neither was ever published, along with a number of others illustrating Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allen Poe, Hans Christian Andersen and W.B. Yeats, for example, they were responsible for securing his first book illustrating commission, from the London publisher George Harrap. Keats’ name also features among his favourite authors in the pile of books depicted in the bookplate he drew for his first major patron, the Epicurean Dublin stockbroker and bibliophile Laurence A. Waldron, during this period. And of course, ten years later, in 1923, Clarke would embark on his secular masterpiece, the twenty two small stained glass panels illustrating The Eve of St. Agnes, the “revel in blue” he made into a window for the staircase of the Jacob family’s residence, St. Michael’s, on the corner of Ailesbury Road, Dublin (now in the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane). This surprisingly large, detailed work uses a miniaturist’s technique to illustrate the penultimate stanza of Keats’ evocative poem, in which the thwarted lovers escape from their warring families in the wintery night of auspicious St. Agnes’ Eve. With full artistic licence, Clarke depicts “thoughtful Madeline” poised apprehensively on tiny slippered feet. Exquisitely coiffed and tiara’d, she is modishly made up, diaphanously swathed in a veiled scarf and vogueishly dressed in an exquisitely embroidered chiffon ballgown – despite the “bitter chill” and storm that awaits her outside her family’s baronial fortress. She is framed by the billowing satin-lined cloak of her “impassion’d” lover, Porphyro, dressed in signature Clarke chequered skull cap, peacock feather and cape. The spiky fingers of his right hand hover around her willowy waist while the other points the way forward to their life together beyond the huge castle door. Theatrically made-up and wearing black

Auction archive: Lot number 54
Auction:
Datum:
29 Nov 2010
Auction house:
Whyte & Sons Auctioneers Ltd
Molesworth Street 38
Dublin 2
Ireland
info@whytes.ie
+353 (0)1 676 2888
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