Preview - Harry Clarke and Artistic Visions of the New Irish State

HARRY CLARKE AND ARTISTIC VISIONS OF THE NE W IRISH STATE Edited by Angela Griffin, Marguerite Helmers & Róisín Kennedy

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 Angela Griffith, Marguerite Helmers, Róisín Kennedy

Chapter 1 19 Harry Clarke: The Honan Chapel Windows (1915–17) Ann Wilson

Chapter 2 47 ‘A gorgeous gallery of poetic pictures’: Harry Clarke, Harold Jacob and John Keats’s ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ Jessica O’Donnell

Chapter 3 73 The Geneva Window: A Precious Gift, Never Given Róisín Kennedy

Chapter 4 101 Harry Clarke’s Natural World Kelly Sullivan

Chapter 5 131 Harry Clarke and Seán Keating: Art, Inspiration and the Aran Islands Éimear O’Connor

Chapter 6 155 Marketing the ‘Elixir of Life’ and Re-imagining Irishness: Harry Clarke’s Illustrations for Messrs John Jameson & Son Angela Griffith

Chapter 7 181 Harry Clarke and The Dublin Magazine Kathryn Milligan

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Chapter 8

203

Other Worlds in The Year’s at the Spring Marguerite Helmers

Chapter 9

225

Meeting Little Red Riding Hood Again: Harry Clarke and Charles Perrault Jarlath Killeen

Chapter 10 247 Harry Clarke’s Swinburne Elizabeth Helsinger

Chapter 11 273 Clarke Studios and the Irish Foreign Missions: Windows with ‘A Very “Irish” Look’ in Africa Fiona Bateman

Chapter 12 305 Legacy and Identity: Harry Clarke, William Dowling and the Harry Clarke Studios Paul Donnelly

Afterword 331 ‘Cloistral Silverveined’: Harry Clarke and the ‘Intensely Modern’ Luke Gibbons

Contributor Biographies 343 Index 347

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INTRODUCTION Angela Griffith, Marguerite Helmers, Róisín Kennedy

Harry Clarke’s Mother of Sorrows window (1926) now presides over a room of stained glass in the refurbished National Gallery of Ireland, a tribute to the centrality of that medium to modern Irish art, as well as a recognition of the growing public acclamation of the artist.1 The short span of Clarke’s career, from 1913 to 1931, coincided with a crucial epoch in Irish history, the emergence of the Free State. In 1922, after the partitioning of Ireland, the new state was founded amidst considerable dissent including the Civil War (1922–3) and ongoing debates centering on its validity as a political and cultural entity.2 The era was marked by fragmentation with no clear consensus on the nature of Irish national identity and many identified an urgent need to find a visual expression of Irishness that could offer a coherent image of the Irish nation. This manifested itself in the identification and creation of emblems and material objects that contributed to nation-building and in artworks that often reflected, by contrast, the irresolution of those years.3 Clarke’s intricate connections with artistic, intellectual, commercial, political and religious circles gave him a profound awareness of the complex cultural make-up of contemporary Ireland, as well as enabling him to design and make work for many of its constituents. While some within these circles endorsed an increasingly prevailing idea of Ireland as Roman Catholic, rural and conservative, others actively opposed this narrowing of the direction of Irish identity. William Dowling, manager of the Clarke Studios, wrote that, ‘I do not think that Harry Clarke gave much thought to politics, but due to his close associations with cultural resurgence it is inevitable that he would have absorbed its national atmosphere. He was too sensitive to have missed anything in the realm of human experience.’4 Clarke, born in Dublin in 1889, was the son of a commercial stained glass artist in whose business he was apprenticed and which he eventually took over. Clarke studied stained glass at the Metropolitan School of Art Dublin, subsequently visiting London and France immediately before the First World War. Here he studied medieval stained glass and became familiar

Opposite:

Harry Clarke

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with Symbolist art and literature. In 1915, he was commissioned to produce eleven windows for the Honan Chapel in Cork. This marked the beginning of a prolific career as a stained glass artist of both religious and secular windows in Ireland and internationally. In addition, Clarke was also a distinguished illustrator and graphic designer. He was an active participant in artistic and literary circles in Dublin. His designs are a recurring feature of the journals, theatre programmes and catalogues produced in this milieu. His short but highly productive life ended with his premature death from tuberculosis in 1931, aged forty-one.

The turmoil of the years preceding the emergence of the Irish Free State is intimated in Clarke’s designs. He developed a highly individualistic aesthetic that endorsed traditional notions of Irish culture while referencing aspects of the European avant-garde. Its intricacy of form and elaboration of detail was seen by many contemporaries as alluding to the complexity and labyrinthine quality of Celtic art, differentiating it from the work of British artists and creating a style that was both modern, Irish and paradoxically individualistic.

Clarke’s multifarious negotiations with ancient Irish artforms and their Revivalist interpretations are ably explored in this collection by Ann Wilson in her analysis of his contribution to the Honan Chapel in Cork.

Clarke’s stained glass works conveyed ideas of a fashionable modernity while also imparting an idiosyncratic version of Ireland’s recognised traditional culture and its natural beauty that was quite different from other forms of imagery to be found in the Irish Free State. His works’ public pervasiveness, located in both Catholic and Protestant churches, in art galleries, cafés and the private homes of influential figures, made them a key part of the visual culture of the foundling state. Clarke was also a leading illustrator with a national and international reputation, earning high-profile commissions from publishers George Harrap and Co, London, including Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen (1916), Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1919) and Goethe’s Faust (1925). In Ireland, his graphic work found many outlets, including illustrations for numerous Irish periodicals. In Chapter 7 of this book, Kathryn Milligan explores Clarke’s designs for Seumas O’Sullivan’s literary periodical The Dublin Magazine (1923–5). He also produced a range of commercial designs including programme covers for the Dublin Drama League and two sumptuously illustrated booklets for the Jameson Whiskey company (1924–5) which are examined in this book by Angela Griffith.

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CHAPTER 1 Harry Clarke: The Honan Chapel Windows (1915–17) Ann Wilson

Between 1915 and 1917, Harry Clarke produced a series of eleven windows for the Honan Hostel Roman Catholic Chapel in Cork which established the young artist’s reputation as a remarkable and distinctive practitioner in the medium of stained glass. Clarke’s windows, and indeed the entire Honan decorative scheme, present a view of Catholicism and its relationship to Irishness that would have been at odds with that held by many Irish Catholics, and by the institutional Church, at the time. The nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Catholic church emphasised its internationalism, its ‘universal’ reach, and the fact that its centre was Rome and its central authority the Papacy.

This view of the Church was promoted in Ireland particularly from the mid-nineteenth century on, the period which some historians have called the ‘devotional revolution’, when Archbishop (later Cardinal) Paul Cullen introduced a series of reforms to more stringently regulate and standardise Irish Catholic institutions, personnel and practices, and bring them more into line with Vatican-approved norms.1 Undesirable local beliefs and practices, seen by many as leftovers from a pre-Reformation or even pre-Christian past, were suppressed or appropriated, and many places dedicated to obscure local saints were rededicated to more authorised international figures such as St Joseph or the Virgin. Within this milieu, Clarke’s Honan windows can be seen as a daring conflation of ancient Celtic mysticism and Catholicism. In the early twentieth century they must have made some viewers confused and uncomfortable in their exuberant depiction of an Irish Catholicism that the devotional revolution was supposed to have eradicated, or at least supressed.

The choice of Clarke for the Honan was influenced by the policy of supporting and promoting the commissioning of Irish arts and crafts in Catholic church decoration. Most of the many Catholic churches built in Ireland during the nineteenth century had been fitted with stained glass windows which were mass produced by international ecclesiastical firms

Opposite:

Harry Clarke, St Brendan (1916), stained glass window.

Honan Chapel, Cork (nave).

Photograph by Jim Wilson, 2010.

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such as Mayer of Munich and Hardman of Birmingham. Later in the century some Irish firms such as the Dublin-based Earley & Powell (known as Earley & Co after 1903) and Joshua Clarke also entered this profitable market.2 Increasingly, however, critics called for the Church to patronise artists rather than industrially organised firms and therefore to support and encourage the production of high-quality, Irish-made art.3 These demands were very much connected with the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement, whose central ethos was a rejection of modern industrialised methods of manufacture and a desire to return to production based on individual creativity and artistic freedom, traditional handicraft and the use of high-quality indigenous materials. One of the most vocal and proactive critics of industrially or internationally produced stained glass in Irish Catholic churches was Edward Martyn, a wealthy Catholic landlord and patron of the arts. In his preface to Robert Elliott’s book Art and Ireland (1902) Martyn blamed ‘the crude paw of the tradesman’ for the poor aesthetics and craftsmanship of Irish Catholic Church art, and called for restoration of church design and ornament ‘to the delicate hand of the artist’.4 He also expressed the hope that Elliott’s book, which devotes a full chapter to denouncing the stained glass in Irish churches, would ‘be widely read and considered by every patron of art in Ireland, more especially by ecclesiastics, because with them is the chief patronage’.5 According to Elliott, Church windows must be designed by artists and by nobody else, however excellent their technical knowledge, if such windows are to be the lasting expression of beautiful thoughts; and designed by artists, trained in the craft, carefully superintending, if not actually performing, every detail of the ‘eighteen processes’, from the coloured sketch to the erection of the finished window.6

Harry Clarke had received a sound craft and business training in his father’s establishment, but he had also studied at both the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, winning a scholarship for three years, and at the South Kensington Schools of Design in London, and he possessed the kind of artistic skills prescribed by Martyn and Elliott.7

The Honan Chapel Project

The Honan Hostel Chapel is unusual in many respects for an Irish Catholic church of the period, not least because important decisions on design and decoration were made not by diocesan bishops and priests, which was almost always the case in other churches, but by a layman with strong connections to the Arts and Crafts movement, a Dublin solicitor, John O’Connell.8 O’Connell was charged with administering a charitable bequest from a wealthy Cork

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01.07 Hardman and Co, St Gobnait (1896–7), stained glass window. St Colman’s Cathedral, Cobh, Co. Cork (clerestory).

Photograph by Jim Wilson, 2013.

01.08 J.C. Buckley, St Gobnait (c.1901), stained glass window. St Finbarr’s Oratory, Gougane Barra, Co. Cork (nave).

Photograph by Jim Wilson, 2016.

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The Honan Chapel Windows

01.09 Hardman and Co, St Brigid (1896–7), stained glass window. St Colman’s Cathedral, Cobh, Co. Cork (clerestory).

Photograph by Jim Wilson, 2013.

01.10 Hardman and Co, Assumption (1896–7), stained glass window. St Colman’s Cathedral, Cobh, Co. Cork (clerestory).

Photograph by Jim Wilson, 2013.

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01.11 J.C. Buckley, St Ita (c.1901), stained glass window.

St Finbarr’s Oratory, Gougane Barra, Co. Cork (nave). Photograph by Jim Wilson, 2016.

drawn twenty years previously by the controversial English Aesthetic artist Aubrey Beardsley, others of the work of the Viennese Secessionist Gustav Klimt. Their figures dissolve into richly coloured and extravagantly patterned robes, and are embedded in an intricate web of quirky decorative and narrative detail which could be seen as distracting, drawing attention away from, instead of towards, the central figures. O’Connell does not say much about the style of Clarke’s images, other than generalised appreciative mentions of the ‘fine harmony in brilliant blues and greens’ of the St Patrick window or the ‘exquisite’ figure of St Brigid, ‘beautiful and dignified’.34 Clarke’s virtuosic style and expert deployment of a sophisticated range of references set his work apart artistically from most stained glass of the period, and connect it to the concerns and innovations of international modern art movements. Yet style cannot be divorced from content, and it is safe to say that a Beardsleyesque saint conveys a rather different concept of sainthood than a Raphael-inspired one.

Church art is always supposed to be more than just aesthetically successful, as its primary functions are pedagogic, inspirational and devotional. By the nineteenth century, a set of visual conventions had popularly evolved as the

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The Honan Chapel Windows

Left to right:

01.12 Hardman and Co, St Colman (1896–7), stained glass window. St Colman’s Cathedral, Cobh, Co. Cork (clerestory).

Photograph by Jim Wilson, 2013.

01.13 Hardman and Co, St John the Baptist (1896–7), stained glass window. St Colman’s Cathedral, Cobh, Co. Cork (clerestory).

Photograph by Jim Wilson, 2013.

safest and most effective means of achieving these ends, and these included a style based on a Renaissance-inspired idealised naturalism, which was seen to convey clearly both the spirituality and humanity of divine figures. The visual standardisation of Catholic saint representations (facilitated by modern developments in mass production and communication) could also be seen as communicating a consistent, reassuring and familiar image of holiness.

Clarke’s luxuriously attired and otherworldly figures do not communicate this, projecting instead a sense of mysterious alienation, punctuated by mischievously playful or sometimes grotesque details.35 The strangeness of Clarke’s vision was privately recognised by the writer and painter Edith Somerville, who thought his Honan windows were ‘very beautiful, mostly’, but also ‘very diabolical’.36 In March 1917, she wrote to her

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01.14 J.C. Buckley, St Colman (c.1901), stained glass window. St Finbarr’s Oratory, Gougane Barra, Co. Cork (nave). Photograph by Jim Wilson, 2016.

01.15 J.C. Buckley, St Fachnan (c.1901), stained glass window. St Finbarr’s Oratory, Gougane Barra, Co. Cork (nave). Photograph by Jim Wilson, 2016.

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CHAPTER 4 Harry Clarke’s Natural World Kelly Sullivan

‘Mr Clarke can make a daisy look corrupt’, writes R. Ellis Roberts in a review of illustrated books in The New Statesman in 1920. He cites The Year’s at the Spring, the 1920 poetry anthology edited by Lettice D’Oyly Walters and illustrated by Harry Clarke, as ‘an example of almost everything book illustration ought not to be’. The reviewer ultimately offers a critique of the appropriateness of the prose rather than the quality of the illustrations: ‘Nothing more disastrous could have been done than to put [Clarke] to work illustrating the simple, gay, or mournful rhymes of modern poets… The result is a book which almost explodes when you open it. At times Mr. Clarke, with a fine black-and-white drawing, simply annihilates the poem’.1 Roberts’s review, published just two years after the close of the bloody Great War and written during the midst of the Irish War of Independence, echoes the violence of the times. He acknowledges the appropriateness of Clarke’s gothic-inspired illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination published a year earlier but comes just short of suggesting the rhymes of these ‘modern’ poets are no match for Clarke’s corrupting imagination.

If Roberts is correct that Clarke could make even a daisy look corrupt, it is unfortunate the artist never had the chance to illustrate Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal (1857), as he had always intended to do.2 The poems in that Symbolist writer’s volume speak directly to an urge to make the abundance of nature, ornament and of the orderliness of human civilisation reflect a corrupt, naturalistic decay. In the introductory poem to Fleurs du mal, ‘Au Lecteur’, Baudelaire declares life to be like art and urges an artistic vision that distorts orderly ornament:

Opposite:

Harry Clarke, The Annunciation, detail of angel and dove (1922), St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, Terenure, Co. Dublin.

Photograph by Kelly Sullivan.

If rape, poison, daggers, arson Have not yet embroidered with their pleasing designs The banal canvas of our pitiable lives, It is because our souls have not enough boldness.3

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Clarke takes Baudelaire’s injunction to heart; his illustration and stained glass work, the product of almost two decades of intensely concentrated effort, reveal a consciously emboldened embroidering of corrupting elements – if not rape, poison and arson, then sexuality, illness and decay – into the literal and figurative patterns on paper and glass. His work reflects a careful study of natural forms only to morph and multiply them into both beautiful and grotesque decorative elements indicating his interest in natural history and botany as well as contemporary art and craft theory. Roberts’s criticism of Clarke’s corrupting hand draws attention to the artist’s deep awareness of biology and the natural world. His stained glass and illustration reveal an interest in the flora and fauna particular to Ireland, and his attention to natural detail in decorative elements of design underscores his connections to the theoretical work of Arts and Crafts practitioners. In their decorative form, such natural elements came to be called ‘floral ornamentation’ and – in jest, given its preponderance in Clarke’s designs – ‘fried onions’ by employees at his Studios.4 Daisies – and primroses, sea holly, bloody cranesbill, burnet roses, bindweed and a myriad of imagined flowers – populate, particularise and ultimately add balancing corruption to the ‘beauty’ of Clarke’s oeuvre.

In this chapter, I argue that these seemingly extraneous details reflect and respond to trends in art and illustration from the Pre-Raphaelites through the 1920s; further, they are linked to Clarke’s careful study of flora and fauna in Ireland, particularly during his travels to the Aran Islands on the western Irish seaboard. These elements contribute to a carefully honed symbolic language of Irish elements in his stained glass windows and in a more stylised iteration in his book illustrations. Details like the limestone pavement in the Annunciation (1922) window in the Lady Chapel of St Joseph’s in Terenure, Dublin, imbue Clarke’s windows with a particularly Irish imagery and symbolism and highlight his Arts and Crafts contributions to the Irish Free State. From naturalistically rendered native plants and geographical features in windows, to the highly worked ornamental flowers that become central to Clarke’s technique, the use of elements of nature in his illustration and glass play an important compositional role and characterise his style.

Yet Clarke’s natural world transmutes – even evolves – through the 1920s to reflect an increasingly grotesque and gothic vision. He was influenced by the diseased and the poor who he saw in inner-city Dublin and, potentially, even by the injured returning from the First World War.5 By the time he illustrated Faust by Goethe in 1925, his attention to floral ornamentation had morphed into a language of larval grotesques, feverish androgynous bodies and the macabre iterations of the evolutionary process. At the same time, he suffered from the physical degradations of tuberculosis and, from the later 1920s, must have known his illness was a death sentence. Clarke’s work reflects scientific

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breakthroughs in the nineteenth and early twentieth century – including Darwinian theories inherited through his reading of the Irish writer J.M. Synge. A decorative rendering of minute larvae and microscopic organisms links his work to the literary and visual arts movements of Symbolism, Naturalism and the gothic. The artist’s own sense of mortality pervades this scientific idiom and imbues it with a personal and human pathos, all of which he transmits to his increasingly disturbed visual work.

Harry Clarke’s training as an artist and draughtsman, in his father’s stained glass studios, at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, and for periods of time in London, indicates that he studied contemporary design. At the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, he worked with Alfred Ernest Child on glass and with William Orpen on life drawing. He made several trips to London as a young art student and kept a studio there for part of 1913; there he likely spent time at the Victoria & Albert Museum, which houses vast collections of design work. Later that year he won a travel scholarship to study medieval stained glass on the continent and visited cathedrals in England and France.6 Clarke’s stained glass and illustrations evidence his careful attention to late-Victorian decorative and ornamental traditions, to medieval stained glass technique and composition, as well as to the shifting world of modern art, including influences like the Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist movements, the designs of the Wiener Werkstätte, and the experimental style of expressionists including Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. The theory and practices of the Arts and Crafts movements in England and Ireland were a major shaping force in Clarke’s design. In particular, his work bears evidence of Ruskin’s injunction to create after the ideal medieval artist-craftsman; thus, in tone if not always in aesthetic practice, Arts and Crafts offered new approaches to traditional medieval work. In the Irish context, Clarke was himself a leading practitioner of the movement, and his Irish idiom reflects a national iteration of Arts and Crafts.7 Clarke’s decidedly original approach to his stained glass work is – like his modifications of elements drawn from nature – one based on careful study and aesthetic influence. He follows a line of British artists working in the Arts and Crafts style, itself influenced by the earlier Pre-Raphaelite work of artists like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and dedicated to the spirit of the much earlier medieval work of artist-craftsmen. Pre-Raphaelite stained glass drew on traditions of Victorian pantheism, which linked a celebration of the beauty and colours of nature with theological worship.8 This mid-nineteenth century Victorian appreciation of nature has its roots in the Romantic movement, particularly the poetry of William Wordsworth,

Nature in Ornament and Design: An Arts and Crafts Tradition

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town depicted just next to the angel’s airborne shoes.39 Just above Mary’s head Clarke places a naturalistically rendered dove in a patterned location just above Mary’s head with a fine shaft of acided white light connecting the bird to the figure. In medieval symbolism, because of the difficulty of representing a disembodied spirit, the dove stands in for the act of conception or the presence of the Holy Spirit. In a final, delicate insertion of floral ornamentation, Clarke adds small white and yellow daisies or buttercups that run from Mary’s halo, around the dove, and appear to fall from the angel’s hands (Fig. 04.21).40

Clarke’s gradual shift to a gothic idiom suggesting monstrous growth and unnatural evolution manifests itself first in his book illustrations; in them he turns to floral ornament but now deployed in conjunction with his growing preoccupation with gothic-inflected symbolism. One of the most extreme examples is his 1919 ‘Morella’, an illustration for the story of the same name in Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination (Fig. 04.22). That nightmarish narrative tells of a woman seemingly reincarnated in her child and of her husband’s obsessive longing for her after her death. As she dies, Morella warns the narrator he will live only days of mourning, in ignorance ‘of the myrtle and the vine’ and instead overshadowed by enduring sorrow, like the cypress, ‘the most enduring of trees’.41 Describing his obsession, the narrator recounts the outcome of his wife’s death through the language of nature: ‘Nor was I indeed ignorant of the flowers and the vine – but the hemlock and the cypress overshadowed me night and day. And I kept no reckoning of time or place, and the stars of my fate faded from heaven, and therefore the earth grew dark, and its figures passed by me, like flitting shadows, and among them all I beheld only – Morella’.42 Clarke turns to floral ornamentation here to capture a threatening sense of obsession and claustrophobia. As Nicola Gordon Bowe points out, this illustration and ‘Monos and

Clarke’s Gothic Natural World

Opposite:

04.22 Harry Clarke, The earth grew dark, and its figures passed by me, like flitting shadows, and among them all I beheld only – Morella, illustration for ‘Morella’, from Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination (London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1919).

04.23 Harry Clarke, Flowers – fantastic flowers, illustration for ‘The Colloquy of Monos and Una’, from Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination (London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1919).

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Una’, completed simultaneously, evince a horror vaccui, a horror of any empty space.43 In ‘The Colloquy of Monos and Una’, floral decoration seems to spread from the lovers’ dresses and mantles to the surrounding earth and sky in a nearly monstrous growth [Fig. 04.23]. Clarke’s use of nature in this image perfectly encapsulates a gothic sense of horror and shape-shifting. The dead Morella’s hair becomes the living plants’ tentacles and runners, and the intricate flower-heads and petals morph into overlapping faces that even cling to the narrator’s hands like jewels.

In stained glass windows of the 1920s, Clarke similarly evokes a gothic grotesque by suggesting an unnatural evolution for natural forms. He uses a now characteristic floral ornament to shift the distinction between decorative patterning and narrative figures. In his 1921 two-light Saints Louis IX, King of France and Martin of Tours, the scene above St Louis’s impassive face reveals a procession of the poor and tattered who reputedly dined at his table (Fig. 04.24). Yet viewers perceive almost no difference between this series of faces and the vibrant array of stylised flowers patterned just above them; the deep red of the third profiled figure’s cap, and the gold and red patterned mantle of the cripple augment and complement the vibrant reds, blues and yellows of the flowers. The carefully and delicately painted faces of the poor seem to match the floral cascade in relative scale and colour; our eye first makes little distinction between the figures and the flowers, despite a distinct leadline cutting between the two fields. This visual blending is intentional, in this instance making the viewer vacillate between an image of a flower or a beggar. Driven by his interest in evolution, decay and the grotesque, Clarke thus breaks down any distinction between the human and natural world. In this instance, beggars become flowers, or perhaps flowers become beggars, thus softening and even making beautiful the visual moment in the window that might otherwise be most grotesque.

Symbolism, Modernism and Degeneracy: Charting Clarke’s Transitions

The transition of Clarke’s use of overtly representational and decorative elements to abstracted, heightened and degenerate forms positions his work in relation to the movements of Symbolism and Modernism. Influenced by and often aligned with the Symbolists, Clarke sought to find, through natural forms, supernatural or spiritual meaning. As Emily Facos and Thor J. Mednick explain, many Symbolists pushed against dominant academy notions that ideal art was purely representational, and that ‘nature provided insight into the human condition’.44 Instead, Symbolists sought attainment of some spiritual or divine meaning that lay beyond the observable world. And precisely this search for meaning beyond the merely visible links Symbolists to the modern – indeed, directly through advances in science, medicine and

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technology. A Symbolist ‘suspicion of pure visual information’ came about in part through ‘awareness of the very effects of invisible forces’.45 The effects of such forces were, in fact, dire, including ‘cholera, syphilis and tuberculosis’ which ‘killed millions in the final decades of the nineteenth century, suggesting not only the existence of these unseen agents but also their malevolent influence, particularly on urban lives. On the other hand, improvements in optics resulted in beneficial microscopy discoveries and the realisation that cells were the building blocks of life’.46 In 1931, Clarke died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland; his Symbolist interest in degeneration and illness has a deeply personal inflection. In effect, Symbolism studied natural forms, sought meaning in the spiritual but, through scientific discovery, comprehended that the truth of the world lies somewhere beyond mere visual understanding. As Facos and Mednick show, such a stance made the movement ‘progressively modern… In demoting absolute representational purity to secondary importance, Symbolism effectively redirected the trajectory of visual art. Its goal was now to evoke the motivating importance of the abstract’.47 This chapter argues that we must read Clarke’s increasingly degenerate and gothic images not only as Symbolist, but also as scientifically-inflected and thereby ‘modern’. The scientific language and discovery shaping Clarke’s outlook made natural science a foundation of his decorative art. In his last work, he moves toward an anguished, fevered promulgation of grotesques, the naturalistic flowers and sea creatures giving way to larvae, distorted features of human anatomy and representations of disease and bacteria.

Austin Clarke offers one of the most pointed connections between Clarke’s design work and his interest in the natural world. He recalls meeting the artist in London in 1926:

04.24 Harry Clarke, St Louis IX, King of France and St Martin of Tours, detail of beggars and flowers (1921), two light stained glass windows, St Barrahane’s Church, Castletownshend, Co. Cork.

Photograph by Kelly Sullivan.

[He] told me excitedly that he had discovered a tank in the back garden of his lodgings, full of tiny wriggling monsters, some of them scarcely visible. He was exalted for he saw in these microscopic shapes, new forms for experiment in art.

He would develop in ornamental designs these fantastic germ-shapes which had been almost hidden from the human eye for aeons.48

Harry Clarke relates his discovery of ‘germ-shapes’ visible to the human eye with the century’s microscopic discoveries; his unpublished drawings from the 1920s and his illustrations for Faust show him pushing the deformed, androgynous bodies he presented in his version of Poe to a new evolutionary level. In black and white illustrations and in the colour plates, which reproduced badly, he indicates an unearthly host of amoebalike creatures bearing eyes, tentacles and a proliferation of sex-organs

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04.25 Harry Clarke, untitled black and white endpiece, Faust by Goethe (London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1925).

(Fig. 04.25). Human forms seem to degenerate into larvae, while larval growths iterate into breasts, bellies and deformed faces. In ‘See what a wild and crazy throng!’, floral ornament shares life with larval growths and a deformed bird (Fig. 04.26). And in the extraordinary witch’s kitchen scene, ‘Methinks, a Million fools in choir’, a newly-young Faust stands beneath a canopy of slimy sexually-suggestive larval growths sprouting eyes, tentacles and rodent-faces (Fig. 04.27).

The illustration reads like a conglomeration of images from many of Clarke’s earlier works including the geographic islands from his Angel of Peace and Hope and Madonna with Saints Aidan and Adrian; the gossamer veil Mary wears in The Annunciation here an inadequate covering for an aged, Otto-Dix inspired hag; and the reclining Mephistopheles posed just as Clarke will pose Ophelia in an underwater scene two years later. Clarke’s illustration also shares a compositional resemblance to Frederick William Burton’s The Aran Fisherman’s Drowned Child (1841), a painting well known in Ireland in the early twentieth century and one Clarke would have seen after it was bequeathed to the National Gallery of Ireland in 1904.49 Not only do the figures of Faust and the witch-hag compositionally mimic Burton’s Aran

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CHAPTER 5 Harry Clarke and Seán Keating: Art, Inspiration and the Aran Islands Éimear O’Connor

In the context of the age of Romantic Nationalism that swept across Europe and America, the west of Ireland as a metaphor for ‘Irish’ had been encouraged by writers such as Thomas Davis as early as the 1850s, and ultimately became synonymous with the Irish Cultural Renaissance at the turn of the twentieth century.1 Accordingly, the significance of the Aran Islands, a small outcrop set into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Co. Galway in the west of Ireland, and its influence on Harry Clarke and his friend, artist Seán Keating, is the focus of this chapter. Both found inspiration among the rocks and ancient ruins of Aran. Yet each developed highly distinctive and entirely divergent artistic styles. Keating’s oeuvre was rooted in Irish literature and tradition combined with academic realism in which his narrative was often given meaning through the use of allegory. Clarke, on the other hand, was inspired to ‘move away from traditional academic art… and to experiment with the possibilities that a synthesis of Celticism’ with a range of international creative elements ‘might offer’.2 As a result, from very early in his career, Clarke’s work was steeped in Irish literature and tradition, but creatively conjoined with European and Eastern literature and mysticism, knowledge of medieval glass and Renaissance art, eroticism, modern art, the real and the imagined.3 Consequently, his work was not a ‘realistic description of the natural world’.4 Rather, for its emphasis on imagination and mystery, and its complex combination of influences, Clarke’s work is explicitly Symbolist.

Therefore, the Aran Islands are a prism through which to step back in time so as to cast a light on two youthful artists in search of their future, to follow the pair through their early careers, to see them image each other and self, and to consider the realities of life for working artists in the environment of the First World War, the 1916 Easter Rising, and later, in post-Treaty Ireland.

Opposite:

Seán Keating, Thinking Out Gobnait (1917). Private collection. © The Seán Keating Estate.

Courtesy of IVARO, 2018.

Photograph © private collection.

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Harry Clarke and Artistic Visions of the New Irish State

Born in the same year, 1889, the two men became friends when they met at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art (DMSA) in 1911. Clarke’s career was cut short in 1931, while Keating lived until 1977. Meanwhile, Clarke’s time on the Aran Islands was brief, if intense, while Keating returned every year until 1965. Both were avid readers and, like many artists of the time, they were influenced by John Millington Synge. Famous even then for his published depiction of life on the Aran Islands, Synge’s ghostlight lingered to illuminate the artistic formation of two of Ireland’s best-known artists of the era.

The Aran Islands: Symbol of Ireland’s Cultural Revolution

05.01 Harry Clarke, Bar scene with three figures seated in front of the bar and one standing behind it, Inishmaan, Aug 15th ‘09 (1909), pencil, 23 x 28.7 cm. Image courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

It was William Butler Yeats who entreated his friend, John Millington Synge, to go to Aran ‘to express a life that [had] never found expression’, often taken to mean that Aran had never been adequately represented in literature, but in fact a provocation to Synge to find his own form of inner expression, and hence, his own style and form.5 Synge was at the vanguard of the Cultural Revolution in Ireland, a position that was merely strengthened by his all too early death in 1909. That was the year that Harry Clarke first visited the Aran Islands to ‘study the natives and their habits’.6 Clarke may well have been influenced by Synge’s articles for the Manchester Guardian, illustrated by Jack B. Yeats, and published in series in 1905, or by the publication of Synge’s The Aran Islands in 1907, or indeed, by the Abbey Theatre’s controversial production of the author’s The Playboy of the Western World, also in 1907. His close observation of the community can be seen in an evocative sketch of the interior of a public house on the islands, which was made during that first visit in 1909 (Fig. 05.01). While the sketch is a direct observation of islanders that demonstrates his academic training in the DMSA, Clarke’s artistic journey quickly took him away from realism.

As the evidence of Clarke’s work demonstrates, in which the ‘the lichen, the goose barnacles, the marine flora and fauna… became absorbed into his imagination and decorative vocabulary’, the Aran Islands made an impact on his Symbolist-inspired style and form, just as it had done for Synge, albeit that the writer’s form was grounded in realism as opposed to the mystical and the imagined.7

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Harry Clarke and Seán Keating

Although trained in his father’s church decorating workshop, Clarke was a part-time night student of stained glass under A.E. Child between 1905 and 1911, and then a full-time Department of Education Scholar at day classes until 1913.8 He returned to the Aran Islands in 1910, this time to recuperate from ‘a serious nasal operation’, and yet again in 1911 and 1912, usually in the company of his friend and fellow artist, Austin Molloy.9 That the history and traditions of the Aran Islands quickly had an influence on Clarke is demonstrated in a series of early student works made under the watchful eye of Child, the two of which, The Consecration of St Mel, Bishop of Longford, by St Patrick (1910) and The Godhead Enthroned (1911) are gently abounding with representations of ancient stone carvings of the type found on the islands, highlighted in shades of blue that recall the sea. Significantly, the artist’s use of lead to aid the narrative drama in the third panel, The Meeting of St Brendan with the Unhappy Judas (1911), anticipates what was to come just a few short years later. His promise as an artist was officially recognised in 1911 when the three panels were awarded a gold medal at the South Kensington National Competitions, to which students from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland sent work (Figs. 05.02–05.04).

Harry Clarke and Seán Keating: A Friendship Established at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art

05.02 Harry Clarke, The Consecration of St Mel, Bishop of Longford, by St Patrick (c.1910), stained glass, 67.30 x 60.30 cm.

Collection Crawford Art Gallery, Cork.

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Harry Clarke and Artistic Visions of the New Irish State

05.03 Harry Clarke, The Godhead Enthroned (1911), stained glass, 68.60 x 63.50 cm.

Collection Crawford Art Gallery, Cork.

05.04 Harry Clarke, The Meeting of St Brendan with the Unhappy Judas (1911), stained glass, 66.70 x 51.40 cm.

Collection Crawford Art Gallery, Cork.

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