A Dublin workshop
Born in Dublin in 1889, Clarke left school to enter his father Joshua’s church-decorating business. He studied stained glass in evening classes at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. Commissions for the Honan Chapel in Cork gave his figures a public setting in coloured glass, where their appearance changes as light passes through the window.
He also developed a career in books. His drawings for Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination appeared in Harrap’s 1919 edition. In King Pest, the figures around a table are crowded together until a grotesque gathering seems almost to overflow the frame. The precision of the small details belongs as much to the designer of windows as to a specialist in Gothic fiction.
Faust in more than one edition
Clarke’s illustrations for Goethe’s Faust were commissioned for an edition published in 1925 with John Anster’s English translation. The undated Arden copy in Lumitheca pairs the art with a different translation, by Bayard Taylor. The designs travelled between books independently of the verse. That distinction matters on a page where a particular line and a particular gesture can seem to have been conceived together.
