Among his noted works in stained glass are the eleven Honan Chapel windows (1915–17) in Cork. Clarke used vivid azure, scarlet, royal purple and emerald green glass to represent Mary, our lady of sorrows, and the saints Patrick, Colmcille, Brigid, Finbarr, Ita, Albert, Gobnait, Brendan, and Declan. In 1924 Clarke completed an exquisite small decorative window based on John Keats’s sensual poem of illicit love, ‘The Eve of Saint Agnes’. His final work was the Geneva Window (1925–29), a spectacular series of panels inspired by fifteen Irish writers, including James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, and Padraig Pearse. The window was initially destined for the Hague, but was censored by the Irish government and is now at the Wolfsonian Museum, Florida. Suffering continually from chest ailments, Clarke traveled to a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland in 1929. He was returning to Dublin in January 1931 when he died in Coire, Switzerland.77 Sadly, his body was not returned to Ireland and his gravesite is not known. Harrap concluded that Clarke ‘will be remembered among the artists of his time for his imaginative power and originality, and it will be written that his early death, in 1930, at the age of 41, extinguished a genius’.78
Like fellow artists Austin Molloy, Seán Keating, and Jack Yeats, Clarke did not enlist in war service. As there was no conscription in Ireland, the artists were free to follow their own conscience. Given an absence of records, it is not possible to record what Clarke’s attitude was toward the war itself, but if we consider the circle in which he traveled, we can perhaps find some answers. Clarke’s friends included a group of outspoken and unmistakable nationalists: Seán Keating, Mary Keating, and George Russell (AE). Clarke’s close friend at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art and in later life was the artist Austin Molloy. Together with Seán Keating, Molloy and Clarke visited the Aran Islands, where so many artists and writers were seeking inspiration from the Irish landscape. John Millington Synge’s literary reputation was founded on the plays and tales that emerged from his researches in the West. The Aran Islands and the Gaeltacht became the face of art for the new Irish State. Molloy later became a teacher at the Metropolitan School of Art, and he also contributed a weekly political cartoon to the Irish nationalist news weekly, Sinn Féin, edited by Arthur Griffith, signing his name variously in Irish as Maolmhuidhe, AóM, and Austin Ó Maolaoid. Molloy also created several book covers for an Irish government scheme to publish books in the Irish language, including translations of popular literature.79
One of Clarke’s early biographers, William J. Dowling, commented, ‘I do not think that Harry Clarke gave much thought to politics, but due to his associations with the cultural resurgence, of which he was part, it is inevitable that he would have absorbed its national atmosphere.’80 Seán Keating offers an intriguing comparative point for Clarke’s own life. Keating and Clarke both studied under Orpen at the Metropolitan School. Orpen himself was Dublin-born, but unlike his two students, he enlisted as a war artist and would be distinguished as one of the most significant British war artists of the conflict. Keith Jeffery draws attention to an important dialogue between the teacher Orpen and the student Keating:
In the early spring of 1916 Orpen’s pupil and studio assistant Seán Keating, a noted artist in his own right, had to leave London and return to Ireland in order to avoid conscription (Michael Collins left England at the same time for the same reason). Keating tried to persuade Orpen to accompany him: ‘Come back with me to Ireland. This war may never end. All that we know of civilization is done for … I am going to Aran … Leave all this. You don’t believe in it.’ But Orpen remained in London, claiming that everything he had he owed to England. ‘This is their war’, he said, ‘and I have enlisted. I won’t fight, but I’ll do what I can.’81
In the comprehensive recent biography of Seán Keating’s life and art, Éimear O’Connor identifies Keating as ‘the painter of Ireland’s fight for independence’,82 a ‘hard-working artist with nationalist ideals and socialist tendencies’.83 In the revolutionary year of 1916 he was a member of ‘the most politically radical’ branch of Conradh na Gaeilge, the Gaelic League, founded by Douglas Hyde in 1893 to promote the study of Irish language and culture.84 Fighters in the 1916 rebellion and later influential members of the government, Cathal Brugha and Michael Collins, were also members of this branch. Keating’s brother Joe was a member of the Irish Volunteers and ‘active in the republican movement for a number of years’, perhaps also as ‘a member of the IRB’.85 Seán Keating met his wife at the Craobh branch; she worked for Robert Barton, the nationalist cousin of Erskine Childers, and also the political activist Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, who was married to the pacifist Francis Sheehy-Skeffington was a well-known opponent of recruitment by the British Army in Ireland, which led to his imprisonment in 1915 and execution during the week of the Easter Rising in 1916.
Before and during the war years, the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art was highly political.86 Louise Ryan writes that ‘many hopeful young artists flocked to Dublin’ at the turn of the century, and ‘[s]ome of the best known and most active suffragists of this period were highly involved in the arts, literature and theatre’.87 These feminists included the Sheehy-Skeffingtons, Margaret Cousins, Sir John French’s sister Charlotte Despard, and Edith Somerville and Violet Martin, of the writing duo known as Somerville and Ross. A number of staff and students ‘joined the British Army to fight in World War One’,88 while the nationalist students, most of whom predated Harry’s time at the college, included Willie Pearse, Constance Markievicz, and Grace Gifford. Grace Gifford was a talented political cartoonist who, like Austin Molloy, promoted Sinn Féin, and was eventually elected to the executive board of the political organization. On 3 May 1916 she married Joseph Plunkett, only hours before his May 4 execution at Kilmainham Gaol for his role in the Easter Rising.
Postwar Displacement
In the 1920 poem ‘Lament of the Demobilised’, the English writer and Voluntary Aid Detachment worker Vera Brittain, who lost her brother and three friends to the war, expressed the sentiments of many: ‘And we came home and found [. . .] no one talked heroics now.’89
This sense of displacement, coupled with the needs of many for mental and physical recovery, would define international postwar sentiment. In Ireland, while on leave and following the Armistice of 1918, returning soldiers could only go out in groups, for on their own they were stoned.90 Denman points out that ‘The growing indifference of the mass of Irish Catholics to the war after the Rising, as Stephen Gwynn admitted, left Irish soldiers “in great measure cut off from that moral support which a country gives its citizens in arms”.’91
While parades and commemorative ceremonies marking the Armistice took place in Ireland from 1919 forward, the public commemorative events were never without controversy. Eventually, the controversy would affect the siting and opening of the Irish National War Memorial Gardens. Yet, whether their noble sentiments or the art saved them at the time, Ireland’s Memorial Records avoided censure by the critics of the war.
The eight volumes of Ireland’s Memorial Records, 1914–1918 are exceptional among the Allied countries of the First World War because of the particular attention given to design and printing. Following the Armistice, English and Irish universities, businesses, and villages began to honour their dead with a variety of memorial works, including parchment scrolls, metalwork tablets, and stone carvings. For example, the Scottish National War Memorial in Edinburgh contains leather-bound rolls of honour lining walls and alcoves devoted to difference branches of the military. Handwritten rolls of remembrance have been placed in a silver casket within a shrine that honours close to 150,000 Scottish soldiers lost in the First World War. Similar rolls of honour may be found in cathedrals throughout England; as I note later, a particularly dramatic example is in York.