Colour me old-fashioned

ILLUSTRATION:Jonathan Barry's first love is books – so it's appropriate that he has created a range of new illustrations for classic novels, writes RONAN MCGREEVY

NEVER JUDGE A book by its cover, but readers frequently do. The impulse to buy a book can be a complicated affair or it can be as simple as the powerful folk memory evoked by the cover of a classic novel.

Jonathan Barry has been illustrating books for 16 years. He was brought in by the London publishers Wordsworth Classics two years ago to help revamp the covers of their paperback series. The publisher specialises in selling classic novels at prices which typically are no more than the price of a cup of coffee. Its books retail in Ireland for €2.99 for most titles.

Barry’s style is immediately recognisable and comforting, even. The colours are vivid and the images are evocative. There are churchyards shrouded in mist, pea-souper fogs, forbidding castles, twisted lanes leading to spectral ruins, ghosts that resemble a shredded sheet, beautiful princes, ugly beasts and an uncanny feeling that you have seen all of this before.

Barry’s paintings are unapologetically old-fashioned, recognising that many of the books he illustrates are not just icons of world literature, but their characters are archetypes that exist independent of their original creations.

Most people have not read Dracula, Frankenstein, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Wuthering Heightsor Great Expectations, but the names conjure up images in the mind's eye more enduring than any words on a page.

This is a tribute to the authors, but also to those original illustrators whose work did so much to give visual expression to the original literary creation.

Barry’s aim is to get some of the “gorgeousness and gothic detail” of his heroes particularly the Victorian/Edwardian illustrators Arthur Rackham, EH Shepherd and Edmund Dulac.

“The greatest compliment anyone could pay me is to say, my God, that painting looks like it is 100 years old,” he says.

A commitment to verisimilitude is paramount and he seeks his inspiration first from the text of the novels. He has just finished illustrating all seven of Wordsworth Classics' Sherlock Holmesbooks. The last one was published in January.

His depictions of Holmes are based firstly on Arthur Conan Doyle’s original description of a tall, excessively lean man with a hawk-like nose and a chin which gave an “air of determination”.

That description was given by the original Strandmagazine illustrator Sidney Paget. Barry also looked to the two most famous actors Basil Rathbone and most notably Jeremy Brett, who played Holmes in 41 episodes of the 1980s ITV drama. To complete his creation he asked his friend, actor Vinny Fegan, to model for him.

"If I was going to do Sherlock Holmes, I want any child or adult of any country or any nationality to be able to walk into a bookshop and say 'oh look it's Sherlock Holmes'and the same for any other character," he says.

Barry says his cover illustrations have contributed to better sales. Of Wordsworth Classics’s 500 odd titles, four of the top 10 books are illustrated by Barry.

Wuthering Heights, his favourite book, has been Wordsworth's bestselling title for two years. It appeared in an episode of EastEnders.Amazingly, his Draculacover appeared in an episode of Coronation Street.

He is scornful of publishers who seek to confound the expectations of people who have an idea in their head of what a classic novel cover should look like.

“Look at those green covers that Penguin are using at the moment and see them beside the Wordsworth Classics. What have they got on the cover? Nothing, it’s just vibrant, psychedelic snot green.

“That cover will not make you pick up that book. You have to give the readers what they want which is to yearn for those old days of nostalgia that are in their heads.”

Barry (44) is from Clontarf, Co Dublin. He was keen on books and art in school, but when he left during the grim 1980s his father discouraged him from going to art school.

Instead he studied English and history in UCD, “my first love is books and second is art” with a view to becoming a teacher. Afterwards, he became an animator in Ireland and the UK, a job he says demands a lot of skill but “no talent whatsoever” unless you are an art director.

He came home in 1993 and started painting scenes from literature. In 2004 he became the first living Irish illustrator to be auctioned at Sotheby’s London in the company of work some of those illustrators who had inspired him.

His paintings typically sell for around €3,500 each and Fingal County Council has bought 18 of them to decorate the beautifully restored church which has become Rush Library.

Fingal has committed to touring the paintings around its libraries this spring and Barry will talk about the works that inspired him.

Some of Barry’s best works are inspired by children’s novels and many are on display around the old altar of the restored church. “It all goes back to the gift as a kid of falling in love with books,” he says.

“I became absolutely passionate about novels and I want to transmit that passionate the best way I can to children.”