Originally published in print February 2021.
If you have ever visited the National Gallery of Ireland, you may already be familiar with some of the eerie and whimsical works of the twentieth century Irish artist Harry Clarke. It is in a small, dimly lit chamber at the back of the gallery that they reside – beyond the bright, high-ceilinged rooms of Irish paintings, the airy portrait gallery, the sweeping staircases. And there is truly no more suitable place in the gallery for Clarke’s pieces; for it is neither his paintings, nor his sketches, nor sculptures that inhabit this room, but his much-celebrated works of stained glass art. As highly stylised as his illustrative work, the figures depicted are solemn, wide-eyed, tall and spindly, distinctively androgynous in appearance and with delicate, exaggerated features. It is interesting that these ethereal and provocative figures should be depicted in this way, as it is sacred art that they are featured in: take, for example, the Mother of Sorrows piece, a Pietà in which a heavy-lidded Virgin cradles a gaunt and emaciated Christ. This style distinct to Clarke sees the convergence of the divine and the worldly, of innocence and near eroticism.
A major influence upon Clarke’s illustrative and eerie style was the Art Nouveau movement, to which he was introduced at a young age by his craftsman father Joshua Clarke. Harry Clarke’s family believed that he was also very moved by the fact he attended the same school that James Joyce had, and that this was a factoring influence in his eventual “fascination with the terrors of damnation”. It was these very terrors that created such intriguing contrasts in his sacred work in particular.
By the time he reached his late teens, Clarke was studying stained glass art at the Dublin Art School; it was during his time there that his portrayal of The Consecration of St. Mel, Bishop of Longford, by St. Patrick was awarded a gold medal for stained glass art in the 1910 Board of Education National Competition. His talents recognised, he then went on to train in London, and after attempting a few sets of illustrations that were never completed, he finally published his first work in 1916: six colour plates and twenty four monotone illustrations for a gift book edition of Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales. His timing could not have been better: the Golden Age of Illustration of the 20th century was just beginning to gain momentum, and soon Clarke was in high demand. It was during this period of time that he produced a series of illustrations for a gift book that made definite his reputation as an accomplished illustrator – a gift edition of Edgar Allen Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. With both Poe’s and Clarke’s styles being similarly eerie, peculiar, and bizarrely romantic, they complimented each other quite beautifully.
Harry Clarke’s strange and wonderful style led him to become leader of the Irish Arts and Crafts movement, a prolific illustrator, and an internationally renowned stained glass artist. The contradictions in Clarke’s work that define his style reflect a broader contrast between Clarke’s work and those that much of it was made for: the Catholic church. Within this repressive and stringent culture Clarke’s work emerged strange and incandescent, just as his stained glass pieces do from the dark walls in the back room of the National Gallery.
