Since Edgar Allan Poe’s stories of suspense and horror were first compiled as Tales of Mystery and Imagination in 1902, many gifted artists have tried their hand at illustrating these haunting worlds, notably Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, and Gustave Doré. But perhaps it is the Irishman Harry Clarke who has come closest to evoking the delirious claustrophobia and frightening inventiveness of “Poe-land”. For the 1919 edition of the Tales, Clarke created the twenty-four monochrome images featured below. Their nightmarish, hallucinatory quality may make you worry for their artist’s mind, until you remember the stories they illustrate.

Inspired by Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and the French Symbolist movement, Clarke’s illustrations of Poe take place against solid voids of black and (less often) white, which seem to throw into relief the author’s obsession with dyads — good and evil, madness and sanity, nature and artifice, darkness and light. In an illustration titled after the final line of “The Black Cat” — “I had walled the monster up within the tomb” — the insane narrator’s murdered wife, entombed with a living cat behind his cellar wall, is discovered by detectives when the feline shrieks. Clarke depicts her decaying, cat-headed corpse riddled with stippled patterns, which bleed into the policeman’s kimono-like garments. It’s as if cat, spouse, and state conspire together against the alcoholic’s descent toward madness; his own body nearly dissolves into the dark, pulled down into the blackness that frames his wife’s monstrous form. In contrast, the landscape illustration for “Landor’s Cottage” (Poe’s last published story, rather devoid of the macabre), riffs on the Rückenfigur tradition and bathes the Edenic vale in white negative space. In Clarke’s ornamentation, we, like Poe’s narrator, glimpse a kind of beauty that presents itself, rather eerily, as natural artifice: “As [the valley] came fully into view—thus gradually as I describe it—piece by piece, here a tree, there a glimpse of water, and here again the summit of a chimney, I could scarcely help fancying that the whole was one of the ingenious illusions sometimes exhibited under the name of ‘vanishing pictures’”. A landscape, described in words as a vanishing picture, subsequently illustrated beneath a retreating fog: even in this quaint, somewhat atypical story, we come to dwell (visually, textually) in Poe’s favored realm, that twilight, clouded state between observation and fantasy.

Born in Dublin on St. Patrick’s Day forty years after Edgar Allan Poe’s death, Harry Clarke (1889–1931), much like Poe, spent most of his life plagued by poor health. After finishing his artistic training, at Ireland’s Metropolitan College of Art and Design and England’s South Kensington Schools of Design (as the Royal College of Art was once known), he found work in stained glass design and book illustration. The publisher George Harrap, who commissioned Clarke in 1913 to illustrate Hans Christian Andersen’s stories, remembered how he “interpreted the immortal tales with an imagination which penetrated the heart of his subjects and transmuted them into still more shining gold”. Clarke worked on a strict schedule, from 10:30 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. every day of the week, and drew at a consistent pace. “Each black and white illustration took four and a half days”, writes his biographer Nicola Gordon Bowe, and “he usually worked on two illustrations at the same time to avoid becoming ‘stale’”. The Poe project began after reading the Tales in 1914, after which he drew an illustration on spec. The publisher George Harrap saw the genius of this pairing of illustrator and author, writing that “there could be little doubt but that Poe’s bizarre and gruesome fancies would offer ideal inspiration to an artist of Clarke’s particular bent”. Often dismissed in his own early life for being derivative of Aubrey Beardsley, the Poe illustrations marked a turning point in terms of recognition, though fame came in trickles, never heaps. “They are not only arabesque, grotesque, the work of an imagination which bodies forth in unaccountable and sometimes terrible shapes the forms of things unknown”, wrote one reviewer of the volume, “but the narratives which move in a mystery are encompassed here by a suggestion of things inexplicable beyond. One remembers nothing that counts like these creations.” Printed in 1919, four hundred copies of Tales of Mystery and Imagination had been sold by December, prompting a second edition.

A new iteration of the Tales with eight color plates was published in 1923. Calla Editions somewhat recently reprinted this second edition and gave it a sane price tag. You can learn more about the underappreciated stained glass artist behind the mesmeric illustrations in our essay “Harry Clarke’s Looking Glass” by Kelly Sullivan.