The Crawford Municipal Gallery
is fortunate to have benefited from the wise judgement and adventurous
foresight
of the Gibson Bequest’s advisory
Committee. In May 1924, they purchased 23 illustrations by the artist whom
“AE”,
George Russell, would call “one of the strangest geniuses of his time”.
Among these was a set of 19
preparatory coloured drawings for what may arguably
be called Harry Clarke’s secular masterpiece - his window
(purchased
by the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin in 1978) illustrating John Keats’ romantic
poem,
The Eve of St. Agnes.
Completed on April Fool’s Day, 1924, the series of miniature panels
was described as “a revel in blue” and caused
a sensation when
exhibited at the Royal Dublin Society that summer. These exquisite pencil,
wash and gouache
studies offer a rare opportunity to study how one of the
great post-medieval masters of stained glass deftly and
unhesitatingly evolved
those magical, ethereal images for which he is now rightly world-renowned.
Like all his
designs for stained glass, they are deliberately intuitive and
sketchy, giving only a more suggestion of the rich,
jewel-like colours and
details of the completed work.
Clarke may be described as Ireland’s major Symbolist artist, whose
synthesis of literary, musical, poetic and
imagined visual images draws on
a wide range of eclectic, sometimes obscure sources to produce an entirely
original and idiosyncratic vision. This is as firmly rooted in the Yeatsian
Celtic Revival and National Romanticism
of late 19th/early 20th century Ireland
as in European Symbolism, Decadence, and Art Nouveau of the same
period,
with the unusual extra dimension of consummate technical skill in stained
glass. Clarke’s ability to
express his art through one of the most
demanding of crafts, in a modern yet traditionally inspired Arts and
Crafts
idiom, gives his work a sumptuous richness and depth usually only evoked,
rather than realised, by his
contemporaries. In Ireland, this fusion of vision
and skill was only achieved by his contemporaries, Wilhellmina
Geddes and
Michael Healy, of An Tur Gloine stained glass studio in Dublin, and, more
recently, by the two
contemporary Cork-based artists, Maud Cotter and James
Scanlon.
The medieval-inspired stained
glass movement in England, for which the early 20th century Irish revival
grew,
reached its fullest expression in the Arts
and Crafts teaching and workshop of Christopher Whall. His influence,
which
was strong on both sides of the Atlantic but formative in Ireland, is apparent
in the three remarkably
mature student Clarke panels which mysteriously turned
up in Cork’s collection. The Consecration of St. Mel,
Bishop of Longford,
by St Patrick is Clarke’s earliest extant work in stained glass, made
as part of a competition
entry in 1910 under the tutelage of Whall’s
former assistant, A.E. Child, at the Dublin School of Art. Like The
Godhead
Enthroned of 1911, it represents a section worked from a full-length cartoon
and was instrumental in
winning a rare Gold Medal for Clarke at the important
National Competition held in the Victoria and Albert
Museum in London during
his first year as a full-time student in Dublin. The young artist’s
dramatic and
technical skills were particularly praised in the Brendan and
Judas panel (1910-1911), leading to his decision
to concentrate mainly on
stained glass.
Clarke’s antithetical, fundamentally medieval predilection for both
the sublimely beautiful and macabrely
grotesque (sometimes in the same
context) is often most marked in his book illustrations, where his love
of detail can be examined more closely than in many of his windows (e.g.
those in the Honan Hostel Chapel,
University College, Cork). Sadly, few
of his original coloured illustrations have survived, for it is only these,
rather than their reproductions, which reveal the microscopic delicacy
and subtle detail of an artist whose
graphic work is essentially that of
a miniaturist. The Crawford Municipal Art Gallery is unique among public
collections is owning 4 originals for the best known, most successful and
often reprinted of Clarke’s illustrated
book, Tales of Mystery and
Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe. When Clarke’s illustrated version
of the book was
first published in London in 1919, a critic wrote, “Never
before…have these marvellous tales been visually
interpreted with
such flesh-creeping, brain haunting, illusions of horror, terror and the
unspeakable”.
The image of the heartless heroine Ligeia (1918), drawn in pen and ink,
is inscribed by the artist in pencil
on the back, “In the excitement
of my opium dreams (for I was habitually fettered in the shackles of the
drug).
I would call aloud upon her name, during the silence of the night – or
among the sheltered recesses of the
glens by day”. Cork’s other
three illustrations were produced in 1923, for a new, coloured edition
of the book:
The Pit and the Pendulum (1923), in black and white, depicts
the tortured story-teller at his death sentence;
the spine-chilling Fall
of the House of Usher (1923), in pencil and watercolour, is inscribed, “Yes,
I hear it, and
have heard, long-long-long- many days have I heard it”;
while Marie Rouget (1923), also in colour, strikes a
less menacing note
with its 1920’s vamp and japonniste vases (even though one is painted
with a tiny murder
scene). It could be claimed that Aquarius (1920), a
pen and ink illustration for Robert Graves’ poem Star-Talk,
which
was published that year in a poetry anthology Clarke illustrated, is of
less interest simply because,
however well composed, it is whimsical, matching
the banality of Graves’ poem, and does not enable Clarke
to evoke
an extraordinary, supernatural image or idea.
Clarke was at his best when his complex imagination, nurtured by his avid
reading and interest in a wide
range of past and contemporary European art
and literature, was free to draw upon a rich vocabulary of
images to depict
the strange creatures of a singularly original and uncompromising spirit.
Although his work
relates so strongly to the first 30 years of the century
in which he lived, both its vision and skill now hold a
particular appeal
to many younger contemporaries, as was prophesied by his own generation.
The following images are pencil and watercolour studies for the stained glass window
"The Eve of St. Agnes"by John Keats.
.
The finished window is on exhibition in The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin.
Click
here to see the window.