Harry Clarke RHA (1889 - 1931)Our Lady and Child adored by St Aidan of Ferns and St Adrian (O'Keefe memorial), (1918), cartoon designed for the Catholic Church of the Assumption, Bride Street, Wexford Town A pair, Charcoal and conté on paper, 202 x 48.5 (79½ x 19) & 204 x 48.5cm (80 x 19")Provenance: From the Collection of Patrick MacEntee SCFollowing the rapturous reception of Harry Clarke’s series of windows for Honan Hostel chapel (1915–17), located on the campus of UCC – the commission which was largely responsible for propelling his stained glass career forward – individuals began to seek him out for memorial windows. Two such commissions which arrived in 1918 were for the Church of Ireland, Killiney, County Dublin and the Catholic Church of the Assumption in the heart of Wexford town; Clarke worked on both jobs concurrently and in fact on one day in September he had a meeting with the Killiney donor in the morning and the Wexford donor in the afternoon.(1) The latter was ordered by a Matilda, wife of William O’Keefe who was a merchant and maltster of Faythe House, Wexford town and the window was in memory of their second son, Lieutenant William Henry O’Keefe. William Jnr was a graduate of Castleknock College and had entered the Royal College of Science, Dublin with the intention of becoming an engineer before obtaining a commission in the Royal Field Artillery. In August 1915 he went on active service in France and was killed by a German shell aged twenty-one in May 1917 at Arras where he is buried.(2) Worth noting is that his memorial window represents one of a very small number in Catholic churches to soldiers who fell in WWI compared with a significant amount in Protestant churches. For Harry Clarke, meeting a client and visiting the location was very important so that each work would be truly individual and would respond to the wishes of the donor, as well as the more practical and aesthetic considerations: the orientation of the window within the church, its height from ground level, the style of architecture, etc. A small-scale, though very precise, preliminary design, usually executed in pencil and watercolour, would then be prepared. Amendments were made if requested by the patron and the next stage was for Clarke to create a ‘cartoon’, a full-scale monochrome plan, usually drawn mainly in charcoal on a single sheet cut from a roll of paper which would accurately show the lead-lines and the key elements of the design. Clarke’s cartoons from this period are remarkably detailed and indisputably works of art in their own right. Perhaps surprisingly for an artist who excelled in crisp black and white illustrations which he made in parallel with his stained glass career, his cartoons for stained glass windows are distinctly tonal and indicate how he intended to paint the different pieces of glass which would comprise the completed window. The only significant absence from these cartoons were the inscriptions – though a designated space was clearly assigned for them – as this was an aspect of the window which Clarke did not enjoy doing, and usually the inscriptions were executed by other artists in the studio under his direction. Details of the O’Keefe coat of arms and family moto are likewise left blank on the Wexford cartoon but fully realised in the window as executed. Clarke created his cartoon for Our Lady and Child adored by St Aidan of Ferns and St Adrian in November and December 1918, and the stained glass window itself was completed in early May 1919.When the leading expert on Harry Clarke, Dr Nicola Gordon Bowe, was assembling an exhibition of his work for the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College in 1979 – which was responsible for reigniting interest in Clarke – she selected several of his finest cartoons from the collection of the artist’s son, David Clarke, and among those she chose for exhibition were his cartoons for Killiney and Wexford. In her catalogue notes accompanying the exhibition Dr Gordon Bowe eloquently wrote of the Wexford window: ‘the alert Child sits on the lap of the demure and neat little Madonna, whose silken cloak is strewn with stars and jewels and whose pompom’d slippers rest on a tasselled cushion. They hover over the coastline of Ireland, adored by the kneeling, devout Aiden of Ferns (with tiny replica of the early Cathedral and settlement he founded and a splendid crozier), while behind him the proud, graceful St Adrian stands with a jewelled and chased cross in a Burne-Jones helmet. The sea, at whose edge they worship and the sky around them are lightly inscribed with a wealth of tiny symbolic motifs, amongst which are tiny perfectly detailed scenes of a Crucifixion and the Ascension, a chalice set in a flaming aureole, an exquisite tiny galleon, one of Clarke’s favourite motifs, another chalice, symbolic of the young man’s sacrifice after great suffering, one triangle set with an eye, another struck by lightning, the young man’s initials (W.O.K.) and a delightful vignette of Bride Street Church as seen across Wexford Harbour… When he had time, his personal deeply religious, poetic and unique vision permeated in intricate detail everything he touched.’ (3)Dr David CaronNicola Gordon Bowe, Harry Clarke – the Life and Work (second edition, 2012), p. 146.I am grateful to Reiltín Murphy for information on the O’Keefe family.Nicola Gordon Bowe, Harry Clarke (monograph and catalogue of exhibition in Douglas Hyde Gallery, TCD, 1979), pp. 106–07.Condition Report: Additional photos of some of the repaired areasAlso of the creases and abrasionsPresumably occurred during the process of creating the windows, these were working cartoons of course See additional images
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