Skip to main content
Collections Menu
Margaret Clarke
Margaret Clarke

Margaret Clarke

1888 - 1961
View All Works
Place of BirthNewry, County Down
BiographyBorn Margaret Crilley, in Newry, county Down, she and her sister, Mary, trained at the technical school, and came to Dublin in 1905, to study under Orpen at the Metropolitan School of Art. Margaret Crilley became Orpen's student assistant, and he bought her work when she was twenty-two. She won Board of Education medals for painting from the nude in 1911, and for oil painting in 1912. She first exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1913 - some portraits. With Harry and Walter Clarke, and her sister Mary, she visited Aran to paint at this time.
In 1914, she and Harry Clarke married. She continued to paint, using their children, and their maid Julia and her brother (who ran the kilns in the stained glass studio) as models in subject paintings, such as The wife and Pierrot and Columbine (1925). In the latter, Thomas McGreevy, later Director of the National Gallery, appears as Pierrot. She rapidly made a name for herself with her rich coloured realist portraits, and received many commissions from the 1920's onward, including the painting of St. Patrick in the Mansion House, for the Haverty Bequest, in 1932. Sitters included Lennox Robinson (whose portrait is now in the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork), President de Valera, Dermod O'Brien PRHA and Archbishop McQuaid.
She taught in the Dublin School of Art and the RHA Schools, and won further medals and a trophy in the Tailteann festivals of 1924, 1928 and 1932. She exhibited landscapes, portraits and flower paintings at the RHA for nearly fifty years, becoming ARHA in 1926 and RHA in 1927. In 1939, she held her first one-man show at the Dublin painters' Gallery. After the death of her husband in 1931, she directed the Harry Clarke Stained Glass Studios with her daughter, and her son David, also a painter. She is buried in Redford Cemetery, Greystones, county Wicklow.
She is represented in the National Gallery of Ireland, the Hugh Lane municipal Gallery, Dublin, in the Crawford Gallery, Cork, the Ulster Museum end in Limerick Art Gallery.