Harry Clarke

Harry Clarke, son of an English ecclesiastical supplier, was born in Dublin in 1889. He was educated at Belvedere College and worked in his father's studio before attending evening classes at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art where he was taught by A.E. Child (manager of An Tùr Gloine) and by William Orpen. His contemporaries at the school included Seàn Keating, Albert Power and Margaret Crilly whom he later married. His time at the Metropolitan School was fruitful. Scholarships enabled him to become a full time student of stained glass and to travel in 1914 to France to see the windows in the great medieval churches there.

Clarke quickly established a reputation as an illustrator in the Beardsley tradition, working for Harrap's in London on such prestigious commissions as the de luxe edition of Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination and Goethe's Faust. These, and the books of fairy tales he illustrated, gave Harry Clarke scope for his love of the fantastic, and were warmly praised by critics in Dublin and abroad. But Clark's reputation in Ireland depended on his stained glass work. His first big opportunity in this area came in 1915 when he designed and made eleven windows for the newly built chapel of the Honan Hostel at University College Cork. Other church commissions followed but Clarke is best remembered today for The Eve of St. Agnes window and his last big work, the so-called Geneva window, commissioned by the Irish Government in 1927 and intended for the Office of the International Labour Organization in Geneva. These windows gave Clarke an opportunity to display his remarkable technical range, his exquisite colour and his narrative skill. The latter comprised scenes from great works of recent Irish literature but was never installed. It was Clarke's last big project. He died in 1931 aged forty-one.