Harry Clarke's 'Mesmeric Revelation' — Poe Hypnosis Scene, c.1919

A gaunt mesmerist looms over a eerily grinning subject mid-trance, surrounded by onlookers in Victorian dress while phantasmagoric diagrams of skeletal figures and celestial beasts float on a screen behind them. This pen-and-ink masterwork captures Edgar Allan Poe's 'Mesmeric Revelation' — the tale of a dying man hypnotized at the moment of death to commune with the infinite. The dense crosshatching, macabre elegance, and occult atmosphere are unmistakably Harry Clarke at his most hypnotic.