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The following year, 1917, Roberts and Clarke, acquainted through mutual friends in Dublin’s literary and arts circles, collaborated on the first purpose-designed and printed catalogue for the Arts & Crafts Society of Ireland’s Fifth Exhibition. Clarke’s striking cover for the Foreword demonstrated his skill as a highly original graphic designer whose intricately drawn framework embellishes the text which it directly illustrates while idiosyncratically interrupting its inner and outer linear boundaries with spirited ornamentation. Roberts’s skill as a printer did full justice to Clarke’s exacting pen and ink work by using velvet-black ink impressed onto finely receptive, cream handmade paper. An earlier more compacted design by Clarke, drawn in 1914 around his ornate lettering for a Higher Certificate awarded to exceptional National School Teachers, had been routinely, and therefore much less effectively, printed by the Commissioners of National Education.
His predilection for offsetting dense matt-black and plain white with a mass of swirling, spiralling and unfurling foliate, floral and geometric decoration can be found in all his earlier graphic work. He was deemed able to obtain ‘effects of perspective and relief’ with ‘the finest pen and the most fluid ... pure black ink’ which ‘others can only procure by the lavish use of wash’.4 Such devices can be seen framing text in the Contents page of his first published book, Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen (1916), in his printed letterheads for the Irish National Assurance Company and The Irish Builder and Engineer, and for the dust-jacket of his black-and-white illustrated Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe (all 1919). The ‘horror and intense feeling … depicted with a grace and beauty of detail’5 with which Clarke illustrated Poe was considered perfectly matched by his ‘arabesque, grotesque’ images, and doubtless contributed to his choice as the ideal illustrator of the Memorial Records volumes. The Irish Times affirmed: ‘Beauty’s loss – the death of loveliness – was his most frequent theme.’6 His illustrations for The Year’s at the Spring, an anthology of recent, including war, poetry published by Harrap in 1920, included memorable images evoking Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Dead’, Julian Grenfell’s ‘Into Battle’ and James Elroy Flecker’s ‘The Dying Patriot’. After the deaths of Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins in August 1922, Clarke’s fitting cover for the simple quarto booklet, A Pictorial Record of the Lives and Deaths of the Founders of the Irish Free State, issued in their memory in Dublin, depicted a grieving woman kneeling at the water’s edge beneath two crosses set against the setting sun.7 On either side of the political spectrum, his ethereal graphic and stained glass memorial images on both sides of the Irish sea convey dignified, idealized sorrow during ‘the sad and mournful time when he was reaching the zenith of his genius’ and ‘parents all over Ireland were mourning lost sons’.8
As Marguerite Helmers suggests, the link between Clarke’s decorations for Ireland’s Memorial Records and such earlier commissions is likely to have been Laurence Ambrose Waldron, wealthy, well-connected Dublin stockbroker, bibliophile and collector, who served on the original Committee of the Irish National War Memorial which commissioned Clarke’s illustrations, and on that of the Arts & Crafts Society of Ireland. Waldron, among Clarke’s most devoted and influential patrons, filled his County Dublin seaside villa with books and the best eighteenth century and contemporary Irish decorative arts. He continued to champion the prize-winning young artist’s pen and ink work and stained glass until he died in 1923, the year the Memorial Records were published. The Irish High Cross memorial Clarke incorporated into the title page of the War Memorial volumes anticipates the similar Lutyens-esque cenotaph cross he drew for Waldron’s memorial card in December 1923.9
In June 1919, Viscount French, as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, launched an appeal pledging the British Army’s commitment to perpetuate ‘the names and personalities of over 49,000’ gallant Irish men and women in Irish and British regiments who had sacrificed their lives throughout during ‘the Great European War, 1914–1918’.10 £5,000 of the National War Memorial funds were spent on this project which gave as much relevant information as possible on each individual person commemorated.11 The Committee’s hope was to incorporate the names on this Roll of Honour into ‘some permanent building or memorial worthy of their memory’. However, by the time one hundred sets of the volumes were printed in 1923, ready for international distribution ‘through the principal libraries’, churches and clubs within Ireland and beyond, this had been precluded by ‘circumstances prevailing in Ireland since 1919’ as Civil War raged throughout the country. Despite the ‘great publicity’ and effort given to obtaining 49,435 names listed ‘from private sources and through the Press’, the delegated sub-committee expressed its profound regret ‘that they ha[d] not been able to obtain a complete list of the fallen Irishmen in the Navy, Air Force, and Colonial Regiments’.
The Committee ensured that the printing and decoration of the volumes were ‘carried out by Irish artists and workers of the highest reputation and efficiency’, particularly in the case of the special de luxe edition presented to the King, George V, in 1924 – as described by Dr. Helmers. George Roberts supervised the setting and photo-engraving of each page of the clearly arranged text, before they were set within the series of eight repeated and reversed ‘beautiful symbolical borders … designed by Clarke’. These, and the decorative title page, were engraved separately by the Irish Photo Engraving Company and the Dublin Illustrating Company, before the whole book was masterfully printed on handmade paper.12 The morocco binding, onlay and tooling on the cover of the special edition were by a Dublin man, William Pender, who exhibited his tooled morocco leather bindings for the writer Lord Dunsany with the Irish Arts & Crafts Society.13 The doublures for the de luxe edition were crafted by Percy Oswald Reeves, the distinguished Arts and Crafts metalworker and pioneering teacher, who had designed and collaborated with fellow Dublin colleagues in making a fine Arts and Crafts enamelled war memorial triptych in 1920.14 Reeves had earlier singled out Clarke as having ‘gone further in achievement than any of his fellows’ in the Irish Arts and Crafts movement not only as regards craftsmanship but also because his work epitomized ‘how a genuine Celtic character marks the best Irish Applied Art’.15
Clarke’s title page, signed and dated 1922, reprinted with alphabetical amendments at the start of each volume, is contemporary with his illustrations to The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault published by Harrap that year. It features columnar, elaborately winged angels bearing the arms of the four provinces of Ireland who hover above the diminutive figure of Hibernia, drawn on same small scale as his half-title Perrault line drawings. Doll-like, turbaned and costumed in Ballets Russes mode, Hibernia stands with her token unstrung harp and wolfhound bearing a flaming torch of remembrance, flanked by the traditional high cross, round tower and ruined chapel associated with her image. The radiating lines of the sun setting over the sea’s horizon behind her symbolize the hope of resurrection while suggesting the symbolically rising sun of the Fianna. Rhythmic loops fall like theatrical curtain rings from the elongated snout of the all-seeing beast framing the Celtic Revival lunette enshrining her. The swirling flowery dots that decorate her robe and the bodies of the beasts beside her recur in both Clarke’s full-page borders and in his Perrault illustrations. Similarly, other signature Clarke devices like the poignant use of silhouettes and neo-Baroque swags and unfurling curlicues can be found in the Perrault. The beguiling zoomorphic Celtic strapwork cornering and bordering the decorative
