The Great Illustrators of Edgar Allan Poe

By Tony Magistrale and Jessica Slayton

Although there have been over 700 illustrators of Poe’s work over the past two centuries, this book chooses to examine only the best of them. Beginning with the French in the nineteenth century and tracing the great illustrators of Poe to the present, this book not only provides close analyses of individual visualizations but also seeks to supply an art history context to understanding their emergence.  The majority of the artists featured remain unknown, even to Poe scholars, although their artwork represents iterations inspired by the most famous of Poe’s poems and stories.  In some cases, the illustrations helped increase the visibility of particular Poe works and to make them part of the international Poe canon.  A few of the illustrators featured in this book (e.g., Manet, Doré, Redon, Beardsley) are recognized among the most famous artists in the world.  Others, such as Martini and Blumenschein, while remaining minor figures in art history, nevertheless produced immortal work based on Poe’s fiction and poetry.  While still other visual artists represented here (Rackham, Dulac, Clarke) achieved artistic fame as book illustrators based on homages to other writers and fairy tales in combination with their Poe studies; their work on Poe, however, helped to solidify their larger reputations as professional illustrators.  The last chapter extends traditional visualizations influenced by Poe to include his impact on twentieth- and twenty-first century filmmakers and cartoonists.  They, too, found in Poe’s writing either a source for direct re-creation or an inspiration for their own atmospheric excursions into the bizarre, the exotic, and the psychologically complex.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: May 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781785277856

Book preview

The Great Illustrators of Edgar Allan Poe

The Great Illustrators of Edgar Allan Poe

Tony Magistrale and Jessica Slayton

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2021

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Tony Magistrale and Jessica Slayton 2021

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021936498

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-783-2 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-783-9 (Hbk)

Cover image: Arthur Rackham, The Pit and the Pendulum in Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, with Illustrations by Arthur Rackham. London: G. P. Harrap, 1935; simultaneously published in the United States in Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1935. Reprints Crown Publishers (Weathervane), 1976; Pook Press, 2015.

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Theoretical Underpinnings

1. The French Poe

2. Visualizing Poe for a New Century

3. Crossing the Fin de Siècle and the English Channel

4. A Parergon for Poe: Arthur Rackham’s Illustrations

5. Postmodern Poe

Works Cited

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project was conceived in a 2016 graduate seminar on Edgar Allan Poe at the University of Vermont taught by Tony where Jessica was enrolled as a Master’s degree candidate. As a result of our mutual interest in the illustrative art that has pursued Poe after his death in 1849, Jessica was first to commence the earliest writing on the book you are holding in her 2018 MA thesis entitled A Par/ergon for Poe: Arthur Rackham and the Fin-de-Siècle Illustrators, which Tony directed. The following year, the University of Vermont supplied Tony with a year-long sabbatical leave that began his writing commitment to this volume. We are grateful to the College of Arts and Sciences at UVM, and its academic Dean, Dr. William Falls, for supporting this research opportunity. Tony’s subsequent essay at the end of that year, Visualizing Edgar Allan Poe for a New Century: The Early Twentieth-Century Illustrators, served as an early abbreviated version of Chapter 2 and was published in the journal Studies in the Fantastic 8 (Winter 2019/Spring 2020): 1–45. We thank the journal’s editors, David Reamer and Sarah Juliet Lauro, for supplying insightful advice that pointed the way to the much-revised iteration now available to the readers of this book. Several individuals and institutions helped to make this book a reality, and we would like to recognize them here. Friends and colleagues read drafts of individual chapters in manuscript form and offered critical help and shaping influence; Sarah Turner, Philip Baruth, Hubert Zapf, Dennis Mahoney, Greg Bottoms, Mary Lou Kete, and Anthony Grudin enriched the quality of our analyses. Jessica would also like to recognize Mark Bowker for his continued support in helping her balance her day job and the writing of this book. At Anthem Press, Megan Greiving served as point guard for this project from start to finish, while Darcy Irvin contributed immensely to improving the quality of the book as an outside reader who contributed extensively to the manuscript’s final draft. Visual images appearing here are accredited under the Works Cited section at the end of the book and in notes throughout the text. Every effort has been made to acknowledge copyright holders, and the authors and publisher apologize for any unintentional omission. We would be pleased to hear from any source not accredited here and would undertake to make all reasonable efforts to include the appropriate acknowledgement in any subsequent editions.

Introduction: Theoretical Underpinnings

One of the classes that Tony teaches every year at the University of Vermont is an introductory survey course covering the history of American literature from its Puritan origins to the end of the nineteenth century. After the first month studying Puritan and Colonial documents and the didactic essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his fellow transcendentalists, the syllabus turns to Edgar Allan Poe. It is as if the class suddenly finds itself released from Sunday school and thrust into Halloween. The level of enthusiasm among the students becomes charged, people who have seldom spoken in the course find something exciting to say, the course material takes on new, dynamic life even as it describes fetid environments on the borderland of death. This is the affect Poe can create on a reader and in a classroom. And it represents as good an explanation as any to explain why Poe’s work is more popular and carries greater significance now, nearly two centuries after it was first composed, than it did during his own era. Something akin to this response is likewise responsible for inspiring over eight hundred illustrators of his poetry and fiction—painters, graphic and visual artists, filmmakers—surely the most for any American writer in our history. These images began as both stand-alone pictures and drawings, poster boards, illustrated series produced to accompany new Poe collections and translations in magazines and in hardcover, popular and luxe editions, and later entered into the highly popular sphere of films, videos, and cartoons.

This book chooses to examine only about two dozen of these visual representations, arguably among the most outstanding. What we have admittedly lost in breadth we have tried to make up in depth. We will leave it to our readers to decide if they concur with our selections. We were, on the other hand, guided by more than just subjective preferences. We acknowledge that this is a volume relative to the authors’ tastes and interests, but certainly many of our choices would appear on any greatest Poe illustrators list. We have assembled a range of visual work—from artists who are well known and frequently reprinted (e.g., Manet and Rackham)—to art that remains seldom viewed and carries with it little or no interpretative analysis (e.g., Blumenschein and Becher). Most of the artists featured here drew, painted, or animated more than one Poe text; in fact, the majority of them did some of their best work on Poe, a criterion perhaps appreciated by the number of times these pictures have been reproduced and the frequency with which they inspired subsequent visual artists. Typically, until the postmodern era, most of the Poe illustrations were published to accompany new book (and elegant gift book) editions of Poe—his stories, poems, his novel—or, less frequently, in stand-alone editions or the flourishing periodical trade of newspapers, journals and magazines.

All of the visual artists discussed here are worthy of serious critical attention, as they, in turn, appreciated Poe as a worthy subject for challenging their talents. How could they not be naturally attracted to the visual possibilities aligned with a writer whose self-professed aim was to render the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque, the fearful coloured into the horrible, the witty exaggerated into the burlesque, the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical (Poe Letter). The modern art world has tended generally to view illustration as a second-class art form, inferior to the high arts of painting and sculpture. This separation can be traced back to the avant-garde movement in the early decades of the twentieth century. High art was distinguished from the low art of popular forms such as mainstream magazine and book illustration, comics, and calendar art. Dealers and academics gradually diminished the history of how integral illustration and publishing had been to avant-garde art to the point where fine artists’ illustration careers were eliminated from historical biographies or framed as a side interest to the real work of serious painters. Original illustrations for many literary texts were often stripped out of scholarly editions; critics dismissed the illustrations, regardless of their quality, as extraneous and/or irrelevant (even when the illustrations were also composed by the novelist himself, as in the case of William Makepeace Thackeray, for example). Illustrations were thus often discarded by those studying the literary text as both a distraction at best and an attempt to sway the interpretative judgment of a reader at worst. And while art theorists have only recently begun to appreciate the cultural significance of illustration as art, the debate continues (Grove 321). We see our effort here as part of that debate, and we make no such distinctions. In fact, quite the opposite: as readers will discover, the detailed attention we provide the illustrative art featured in this book is meant to infer that it is as nuanced and complex as any painting hanging in a museum. This book offers a glimpse into the incredible variety of visual imagery that Poe’s texts have given rise to—pictorial space that reimagines Poe’s literary grappling with horror, the grotesque, violence, mystery, and madness. A glimpse that is best appreciated when these pictures are juxtaposed together.

Despite the extensive collection cataloged by Burton Pollin in his seminal book Images of Poe’s Works: A Comprehensive Descriptive Catalogue of Illustrations, there exists a paucity of interpretative scholarship that actually explores in any detail the historical sweep of Poe illustrations and their importance. Beginning with the French in the nineteenth century and tracing the great illustrators of Poe to the present, this book provides close analyses of individual artists and their artwork. At the same time, its authors seek to supply (1) an art historical context to understanding their particular emergence in accordance with relevant time periods and artistic movements, and (2) an intertextual comparison of the relationship between a particular scene from a Poe text and its visualization. Similar to our own choices in the selection of art and artists included in this book, the latter also made their own set of choices about which tales or poems to illustrate. So also implicit in the design of this book is the question: what impact, if any, did these illustration choices have on critical interpretations of Poe—his reputation among general readers as well as among scholarly interpreters? Much of the artwork featured in the chapters to follow remains unknown to the general public, even to most Poe aficionados and scholars, although these are iterations inspired by what has become over time the most famous and recognizable of Poe’s poems and tales. Indeed, academic evaluations of Poe’s illustrators are typically found more within the province of art historians and bibliophiles than Poe scholars. This in spite of the fact that in some cases, the illustrations heightened the visibility of particular Poe works and helped to elevate them into an international Poe canon. For decades artists have been repeatedly and particularly drawn to the memorable details inspired by a half dozen of the fifty short poems Poe wrote in his lifetime—The Raven, The Bells, Annabel Lee, City in the Sea, Dream-Land—and myriad images from his short stories that startle at the same time that they captivate: the decadent elegance of the lovely Lady Ligeia, the verticality associated with an enlarging arc of a scalpel pendulum, the surprise entombment of Fortunato, the sudden arrival of the plague disguised under the masque of the Red Death. At this point in time, we have to ask ourselves, would these memorable figures be quite as memorable without the great illustrations that have accompanied them for more than a century and a half? Is our relationship with Poe’s work at the very least informed by historical and contemporary visual adaptations that pervade the canon? Are we ever fully able to extricate our understanding of the text from the visual world that accompanies it?

Given the relationship between Poe’s literary texts and prints inspired by them, the concept of providing illustrations and their role in interpreting, representing and so often expanding on the meaning of the parent-narrative creates a range of issues and questions with which we have wrestled and to which we kept returning in the course of writing this book. In what ways do different works of art talk to each other? What is the significance in collectively examining these artists and their images together, tracing the work of Poe’s illustrators across different art movements and up through the postmodern era? Is it possible to present an objective pictorial representation of a given literary text or must every interpretation involve its own analysis and therefore force us to accept it on its own terms? What if those terms encourage an audience to take the meaning of a narrative well beyond the intentionality of its author’s language or in a direction that even defies authorial intent? Can an illustration ever be viewed out of context, beyond the parent-narrative that inspired it, subsisting in its own created universe? Is it ever appropriate to question the authority of, much less place limits on, an artist illustrating a text composed decades earlier by someone else? At what point does a representation painted in the personal style of an artist free itself from the boundaries of a homage to become a separate work of art? How did Poe illustrations evolve over time, and in what ways were these differences indicative of changing scholarly (as well as popular) emphases on Poe’s importance as a writer and his place in American letters? These were the core theoretical questions that pursued us as we explored the oeuvres of Poe’s greatest illustrators, and our varied responses to them permeate the chapters that follow.

We ground much of our exploration in Jacques Derrida’s conception of supplemental theory, best grappled with and documented in his seminal text titled The Truth in Painting. Supplemental theory is built on the ekphrastic interchange that occurs between the parergon and ergon, more simply referred to as the frame and the work, respectively. As the frame or supplemental entity, a parergon, simultaneously stands to the side of the ergon, or stand-alone work, while irreversibly altering it once added. By nature, illustration exemplifies this relationship; visual art serves as a supplemental frame for the text it accompanies, separate yet indivisible once seen together. Derrida states that—without fail and without intention—the ergon is inherently incomplete, thus creating space for the parergon to attach itself. An ergon is incomplete due to the inaccessibility of the holistic, ordinary truth—or etymon—of the work; it signifies just one version of a multitude of truths contained in a work of art. The omnipresence of an etymon within the text opens up a space through which readers, artists, and other writers could add their own meaning and contribution, building upon and shifting the meaning of the original text as it passed through time. The parergon cannot be tacked on to a whole, completed text, simply because it cannot exist—the etymon within an ergon is never fully sated of meaning; there is always something lacking, something always preventing holistic completeness. The parergon maintains a degree of separation because it comes after the completion of the ergon, meaning that it attempts to fill this lack by working both alongside and within the text, which alters the way that it interacts with readers. Without considering the presence of incompleteness, a supplement is only an addition. The interchangeable, transformative, external parergon fills the cracks in a narrative that the author leaves there because of his or her own subjectivity—the parergon transforms by layering the piece with additional subjectivity. More specifically, Poe’s text represents a completed tale or poem, even though he often revised his work each time he would republish it in a different east coast magazine or newspaper; additionally, it leaves open many avenues of representation due to the subjective nature of art and storytelling. Our illustrators’ work, as parerga for Poe’s text, establish additional avenues of representation through which to access the etymon. This contributes toward the filling in of the gap inherently left by the text since it is just one of the infinite variations of representation and meaning.

Poe often wrote favorably about the use of illustrations to accompany literature. He used the term graphicality in his reviews and essays to describe qualities in storytelling that emphasize subjective atmosphere and effect, the establishment of the force with which they convey the true by the novel and unexpected, what the writer praised as the inescapable and ever-intensifying ability to paint a scene less by its features than by its effects (Harrison 75). Even though Poe obviously could not have known about Derrida, the graphicality of an illustration echoes the parergon’s individual, unique ability to complicate the ergon—or text—it represents by adding in an additional level of subjectivity. While only six of his works published during his lifetime included illustrations, Poe believed that visual art that accompanied a narrative had the potential to augment the reading experience, especially if the art was good enough to challenge the reader’s understanding of the text (Cantalupo, Visual 679). In the act of comparing the relative effects produced by language juxtaposed with a highly visual image, the reading experience expands accordingly. Poe believed that a well-conceived illustration produced an action similar to when two insightful readers supply differing interpretations to a discussion about a narrative or poem; if each is as open-minded a listener as she is a critic, the potential exists for both positions to be enhanced in the resultant conversation. In other words, texts and pictures should be mutually invigorating, each helping to define an audience’s evolving comprehension. On the other hand, Poe was also a demanding book reviewer and literary critic. Just as he often exploited his editorial positions to perform acts of savagery against the sentimental and didactic tendencies of an age that Poe felt had debased the arts in general and pandered to the low tastes of an ignorant readership, he was equally critical of poorly executed illustration, and often for the same reasons. If the visual art failed to measure up to the written text, if it displaced the reader’s ability to captivate her own imagination or to sustain the atmospheric effects created by the writer, the aesthetic pleasure associated with the act of reading the text was correspondingly weakened. Yet, despite his many criticisms of distracting, irrelevant, [and] non-contributory elements associated with the production of literary art, Poe never cites any illustration specifically, even in his more than one hundred reviews of illustrated texts (Pollin 2).

The reception history of Poe’s place in America culture is bifurcated. A few of his enlightened contemporaries recognized that Poe was more than Emerson’s dismissive jingle man, even if it did require posthumous generations to recognize the full range of his contributions. W. Scott Poole informs us that Poe’s fiction became a mainstay in American literature by the 1920s and the arrival of the New Critics. By midcentury, an academic Poe industry was in full bloom (657). Like our own contemporary Stephen King, Poe’s work possesses the power to command serious critical attention from scholars and fellow creative writers in multiple fields of study at the same time that both King and Poe have become dominant figures in popular mass culture. Poe may have started out as a darling of the French avant-garde, but he now belongs to the world as one the most recognizable Americans in history. There are few artists who have been able to bridge the academic-pop culture gap so consistently over time. For example, Poe appears in the role of a Virgil-like guide in Hart Crane’s epic poem The Bridge (1930) at the same time that for the past century he has occupied a pivotal place in the popular imagination, identifiable even by those few who have managed to leave high school without reading his work. Mark Edmundson highlights this duality of Poe’s place in world culture when he reminds us that Poe’s Gothic genius lived on through Hawthorne and Melville and enters the present in a myriad of forms, from Anne Rice’s novels to the daytime talk shows of Oprah Winfrey and company (73). We find a parallel trajectory when we consider Poe’s influence on the visual arts. His reputation began as a poet who found resonant and sympathetic strains in the artistry of nineteenth-century Symbolism and twentieth-century Modernism. With this elite inheritance encouraging other illustrators to take up his work, the writer experienced a similar crossover effect insofar as illustration has always maintained its place as a mass and popular art form. However, as this book seeks to promote with our careful examination of individual work from various visual artists, the best of his illustrators understood intuitively that beneath the veneer of Poe’s well-worn Gothic landscape there also lurked a brilliant psychologist and philosopher.

Poe’s poetry and prose were admired and served to influence generations of illustrators throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and his impact continues into our own time. While Poe has maintained a constant fascination for visual artists from the 1870s to the present, certain works of Poe have always held greater attraction for illustrators at various moments in history depending upon which schools of art were in vogue. For example, the great French painters of the nineteenth century were drawn particularly to Poe’s poetry, especially The Raven and The Bells, because it resonated with the aesthetics of contemporary movements such as Impressionism, Symbolism, and Decadence. Artists from the early twentieth century, by contrast, responded more to Poe’s prose because they viewed his short stories and Pym as emblematic of Modernism’s attention to psychological distortion, alienation and fragmentation. As our book moves into examples of postmodern illustration, the Poe that emerges is intricately connected to popular culture, notably celluloid and cartoon visualizations. Thus, it is no coincidence that the roughly 150-year sweep of Poe illustration is closely aligned with the history of illustration itself, and both were indelibly shaped by the evolving history of modern art—from Impressionism to Post-structuralism. As Jonathan Elmer posits, Competition between word and image may be an ancient practice, but it is always historical, always engaged according to the ideological and media-specific state of play at the moment (706). Poe spoke, and continues to speak, to generations of artists and readers, but what he has to say in particular is typically dependent upon the generation that happens to be performing the act of reading and interpreting. Worthy of note is that Poe’s illustrators, like visual artists working anywhere and at any time, infuse their subject images with a distinctly personal and era-specific style and vision—an interpretation of Poe that is uniquely their own. From the earliest woodcuts that Poe himself supervised to the postmodern era, Poe’s adapters represent a blend of the artistic aesthetics from their time, the particular emphasis that a given era supplied to reading Poe, the inspiring vision of the writer himself that two hundred years later continues to terrify at the same time that it fills his readers with awe, and the inimitable personal style that artists brought to canvas, paper, and celluloid.

The French introduced Poe to literary Europe and beyond via the Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé translations in the second half of the nineteenth century. Reflective of his dual obsessions with art and literature, Baudelaire, perhaps history’s greatest admirer and defender of Poe, yearned for years to see his French translations of the American’s stories illustrated. While it turned out to be the poem The Raven that captured the attention of the earliest French visual artists in the second half of the nineteenth century, they still produced work that reflected their respectful appreciation of Poe’s genius and, particularly in Manet’s case, found a way of transplanting his poetic sensibility into quotidian French society. Baudelaire needed to wait, however, until the twentieth century for French illustrators to join other world cultures by focusing their attention on Poe’s prose narratives with a heightened emphasis on the American’s inclusion of convulsive violence and surreal dreamscapes.

As interest in fine illustrated books grew commensurate with advances in printing press technology, and with the advent of a new century, modern artists