for a new plan of attack from the north. This attack was successful, and in his official report, John Buchan wrote, ‘The men of Munster, Leinster, and Connaught broke through the intricate defenses of the enemy as a torrent sweeps down rubble.’72
However, two other objectives beyond Guillemont remained: a heavily fortified area known as the Quadrilateral and the town of Ginchy. Until the advance on Ginchy, ‘the brigades of the 16th Division were thrust piecemeal into a continuing battle under the command of other divisional commanders’.73 On September 5, Major-General Sir William Hickie leading the assembled Irish Division was successful in taking the town. On September 9, Ginchy was secured. One of the casualties was Lt Tom Kettle of the 9th Royal Dublin Fusiliers, poet and barrister, who was shot while leading his men into the ruins of the town. (Ironically, five months earlier, his brother-in-law Francis Sheehy-Skeffington was executed during the Easter Rising.) With Kettle was James Emmet Dalton, who, having survived the war, would go on to join the IRA. Dalton was with Michael Collins during the 1923 ambush and assassination at Béal na Bláth, Cork. The total number of casualties from Irish regiments at the battles at Guillemont and Ginchy are 11,500.
Harry Clarke and the Arts in Dublin
When Harry Clarke was awarded the commission to prepare borders for Ireland’s Memorial Records, he was 30 years old, a father, and just beginning the decade that would be the most fruitful of his short career. That year, his friend Thomas Bodkin, a Governor of Ireland’s National Gallery of Art and Clarke’s lifelong friend, wrote an article titled ‘The Art of Mr Harry Clarke’ for the important artists’ monthly, The Studio, which praised Clarke’s artwork, citing over 250 of his completed works.74 That same issue contained several articles relating to war memorial commissions. Ultimately, the Studio article gave Clarke exposure in England and America that would lead to many commissions and extend his work beyond Ireland.
Harry Clarke was born in Dublin on 17 March 1889, the son of Joshua, a stained-glass manufacturer and church decorator hailing from Leeds, and the former Brigid MacGonigal from County Sligo. Like James Joyce, he received a Jesuit education at Belvedere College on Dublin’s north side. Clarke studied at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin and the South Kensington School of Design in London. Returning to Dublin to work in the stained-glass studio of his father, he became involved with the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland and the Guild of Irish Art Workers, and he resumed studies at the Metropolitan School of Art with William Orpen. In his memoir Some Memories, 1901–1935, George Harrap recalls Clarke as ‘an indefatigable worker,’ citing the ‘over two hundred finished works’ that Clarke completed between 1915 and 1919.76
FIGURE 1.8
Harry Clarke, circa 1924. Image courtesy of Fianna Griffin.
The illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination represent a transitional moment in Clarke’s illustrations, in which they move from a spare and gracious design to a darker and more complex pallet of line and ornamentation. Within the Poe drawings, viewers begin to detect the subversive elements that would dominate the drawings of the 1920s. It is as if Poe’s literary explorations of heaven and hell, beauty, madness, sin, and horror awakened in Clarke a need to express his own experiences, the dichotomy of earthly physical existence with the teachings of the Catholic Church. For example, the plate that accompanies Poe’s tale of Ligeia presents the lady elaborately bound in a black ribbon that straps her stomach, falls loose at the breast, and delicately balances a cloak at her back. Her bare breast draws attention to the way that she is sensually alive while physically dead. Beyond this image, Clarke carries the motif of binding and unwinding through other illustrations in the Poe volume. The most prevalent of these are the tattered winding cloths that trail from the corpses in the illustrations. Even some of the living characters are swathed in burial cloths that untwist elaborately; Clarke’s visual puns twist the ribbons and shrouds into decorative scroll patterns on the pages, motifs that would recur in Ireland’s Memorial Records.
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
