Classic Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault E-Book

Charles Perrault

• Herausgeber: Gill Books
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

This long unavailable collection of Charles Perrault's Classic Fairy Tales has been updated for a modern readership and accompanied by the stunning illustrations of Irish artist, Harry Clarke. Although now best known for his stained glass work, Harry Clarke (1889-1931) first found fame as a book illustrator. His illustrations first appeared in print in 1916 and his talent was quickly acknowledged as he became recognised as one of the key illustrators during the golden age of gift-book illustration. The fairy tales were collected by 17th-century French writer Charles Perrault and include such famous tales as Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty and Puss in Boots.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title page

INTRODUCTION

LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD

THE FAIRY

BLUE BEARD

THE SLEEPING BEAUTY

PUSS IN BOOTS

CINDERELLA

RIQUET WITH THE TUFT

TOM THUMB

THE RIDICULOUS WISHES

DONKEY SKIN

THE LIFE OF CHARLES PERRAULT

Acknowledgements

Copyright page

About Gill & Macmillan

Harry Clarke’s work as an illustrator and stained-glass artist

Henry (Harry) Patrick Clarke, prolific and award-winning stained-glass artist and master illustrator, was born in Dublin on St Patrick’s Day, 1889, to an English father and an Irish mother. He went to school at Belvedere College in Dublin, leaving in 1903 to work in his father’s church decoration and supply business, where he learned the techniques of his trade. He augmented his practical experience with studies at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, where he later taught illustration.

Described by the art critic Brian Fallon in 1983 as ‘Ireland’s only great Symbolist’,1 a label that has frequently been attached to him, Harry Clarke was lauded in his lifetime by Æ as ‘one of the strongest geniuses of his time’.2 Although the style he evolved was completely his own, his influences were many and varied, ranging from Art Nouveau, the Arts and Crafts Movement, Aubrey Beardsley, Gustav Klimt, the dazzling costumes and choreography of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and the stained-glass windows at Chartres Cathedral and Sainte-Chapelle, Paris. His incredibly detailed and intricate work, which drew heavily on Irish legend and mythology, was in tune with the Celtic Revival movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His favourite colour, blue, is used liberally in both his stained glass and his illustrations, echoing the stained glass of Chartres and the windows and vaulted ceilings of Sainte-Chapelle. Much is made of his ‘dualism’, and it is true that good (in the guise of beauty) and evil appear alongside each other in much of his work, particularly his illustrations.

The Song of the Mad Prince, 1917, stained-glass panel, © National Gallery of Ireland

In 1914 Clarke visited the cathedral at Chartres. The stained-glass windows there inspired him to use the deep, rich colours that would become such a characteristic of his glasswork and illustration. His predilection for a wonderful rich blue recalls the expensive lapis lazuli pigment traditionally used by medieval and Renaissance painters for the Virgin’s cloak. One of the exceptions to his bold use of colour is the series of quite restrained stained-glass windows in Bewley’s Oriental Café, Grafton Street, executed in 1928, towards the end of his life, and as much a part of Dublin’s urban landscape as its more obvious sculptural and architectural landmarks.

From an early stage in his career Clarke was getting small commissions for the design of theatre programmes, posters and the like. His first commission for book illustration was for Alexander Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’, followed by a commission for Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. When he had a significant portfolio of literary illustrations he brought it to 12 London publishers in turn, and was rejected by each of them. In the winter of 1913, however, he was commissioned by George C. Harrap & Co. to illustrate the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, to be published in a limited, signed edition. Harrap’s decision was probably influenced by the success of an edition of Andersen illustrated by Edmund Dulac, and a popular retelling of the stories by Arthur Quiller-Couch, with illustrations by the young Danish artist, Kay Nielsen. There were to be 40 full-page illustrations in all, 16 of them in colour.

Illustration by Harry Clarke from Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen. Photo © NGI

Illustration by Harry Clarke from Tales of Mystery & Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe

The illustrations were completed in April 1915 and Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen was published in October 1916 in three editions, with 16 full-page colour plates, 24 full-page black and white drawings and numerous decorations. An unsigned review in The Studio dismissed Clarke as just another of Beardsley’s disciples, but the volume was generally well received.

Just as he was finishing the Andersen illustrations, Clarke started work on his first big stained glass commission, for five windows in the Honan Chapel at University College Cork, completed in 1918. Reviewing them in The Studio, Clarke’s friend Thomas Bodkin, who was later appointed director of the National Gallery of Ireland, wrote that the windows’ ‘sustained magnificence of colour, their beautiful and most intricate drawing, their lavish and mysterious symbolism, combine to produce an effect of splendour which is overpowering’.3 The Honan windows, together with the Hans Andersen illustrations, established Clarke’s reputation as a stained-glass artist and book illustrator.

While he was working on the Harrap commission Clarke was reading Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery & Imagination, and in 1919 he was commissioned by Harrap to execute pen-and-ink and watercolour illustrations for the stories. Earlier comparisons to Beardsley may have contributed to the development of his unique, brooding style for these. The first edition was published in October 1919 in four editions, including a de luxe limited, signed edition of 170 copies. It was heavily marketed by Harrap, was very favourably received by the critics and achieved record-breaking sales. Shortly afterwards Clarke was commissioned by Harrap to produce 12 line drawings, 12 watercolours and 22 decorative drawings for The Year’s at the Spring, a collection of contemporary poetry selected by Lettice d’Oyly Walters, which was published in September 1920 – again, the illustrations were greatly admired. His success must have given him the confidence to approach Harrap in November 1920 with a proposal to publish a translation by Thomas Bodkin of Charles Perrault’s Mother Goose fairy tales. He included a sample illustration, but Harrap reacted unenthusiastically, turning down the proposal for reasons of expense. Bodkin suggested approaching Hodder & Stoughton instead. Sir Ernest Hodder Williams was interested, although he wasn’t convinced that Clarke’s illustrations would be right for them. He asked him to produce two more specimen illustrations, suggesting satisfactory terms if the project went ahead. However, having worked solidly for two weeks working up three (rather than the two requested) samples, Clarke received a rejection from Hodder on the ground that although the illustrations were beautiful they were unlikely to appeal to their important children’s market. The project was dropped until the end of 1921, when Clarke approached Harrap once again. This time they agreed to publish.

The Fairy Tales of Perrault, published in August 1922 in several different editions with an introduction by Thomas Bodkin, had 12 colour plates, 12 black and white drawings, and numerous decorations. Of these, it seems that only one colour plate survives, ‘He Saw, Upon a Bed, the Finest Sight Was Ever Beheld’, bought in 2010 by the National Gallery of Ireland.

It is immediately clear that the colours have changed since the publication of the Hans Christian Andersen volume and the palette is now much more subtle. Silhouettes (see ‘Tom Thumb’) are used to good effect, and there is even an overtly erotic element to some of the illustrations (see ‘Donkey Skin’ and ‘The Sleeping Beauty’). Some of the characters are caricatures of Clarke’s contemporaries, although this is of little significance to today’s reader. This was a book for adults rather than children. Perrault’s tales, predating Andersen’s by about 150 years, are not the soft-focus sanitised versions with which later generations have become familiar. In ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, for example, there is no happy resurrection of the child and her grandmother at the end of the story – they are eaten by the wolf and that’s the last we see of them. In these often gently witty stories actions have consequences; characters are certainly rewarded for being good or beautiful or clever, but stupidity, even if well intended, and even if allied with goodness and beauty, results in disaster. Perrault even appended a little moral verse (or two) to the end of each story, just to drive home his point.

‘HE SAW UPON A BED, THE FINEST SIGHT WAS EVER BEHELD’ Photo © NGI

Clarke seems to have tapped into the darker aspect of the stories – The English Review drew attention to the ‘unearthliness’ of the images – and there is a menacing quality to many of the illustrations, playful and caricaturing though some of them are. By the time he was working on Perrault, Tales of Mystery & Imagination had been published in two editions; perhaps Clarke thought the Perrault stories lent themselves to the approach he had employed in that series of illustrations. Unfortunately, The Fairy Tales of Perrault failed to achieve the critical acclaim that had greeted the publication of the Andersen volume and sales were poor. According to Nicola Gordon Bowe, the ‘idiosyncratic and fantastic detail’ of the illustrations ‘were perhaps too weird for a generation attuned to the illustrations of Rackham, Dulac and the Robinsons’.4 However, children today, inured to the weird and fantastic by television, film and computer games, may find the Perrault illustrations less disturbing than their predecessors might have done in the 1920s.

When he died in 1931, Clarke bequeathed a wealth of stained glass, both religious and secular, and a substantial list of illustrated publications. His windows live on, but many of his original book illustrations were held at the Harrap offices in London and were burned during the Blitz. Others were destroyed during the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. Happily, the National Gallery of Ireland holds one of his original Perrault illustrations and a number of the illustrations for Hans Christian Andersen.

Notes

1 ‘The Irish Symbolist’, The Irish Times, 10 December 1983.

2 George Russell, The Irish Statesman, 21 December 1929.

3 ‘The Art of Mr Harry Clarke’, The Studio, November 1919, p.46.

4 Nicola Gordon Bowe, The Life and Work of Harry Clarke (Irish Academic Press, Dublin, 1989), p.145.

Drawing by Clarke, thought to be a self-portrait.