though paraphrasing ancient silver hinges. Close observation reveals cavorting beasts with plumed heads and knowing eyes, vestigial limbs and spiralling chameleon tails amidst motifs loosely drawn from Early Christian burial monuments. Here is a modern reworking of an illuminated ‘carpet’ page, whose almost imperceptibly pierced border is modulated in Clarke’s inimitable miniaturist pen and ink technique.
There is nothing tenuous about Clarke’s eight borders within the Books of the Dead. Stylistically, their ‘lavish ornamentation, superlative craftsmanship and fine materials’ may conform to definitions of Art Deco.16 But the restless, relentlessly fluid unfurling arabesques ebbing and flowing like crested waves, threatening to engulf poignantly observed pictorial vignettes, and the flattened leafy, feathery swags interlaced like ropes around the accoutrements and insignia of war are unique in Clarke’s work. As the tragedy unfolds in tiny silhouetted scenes derived from contemporary photographic records of soldiers engaged in battle, angels and risen warriors await the dead, bearing laurel wreaths and military honours.
It would be ten years before the Trustees of the Memorial Fund and the Free State Ministry of Finance agreed to acquire a ten-acre site beside the River Liffey at Islandbridge, near Dublin’s Phoenix Park, in order to erect a permanent Irish War Memorial. When this was finally opened on Armistice Day 1940, the Books of the Dead were placed not in pairs in each of the four granite pavilions Sir Edwin Lutyens had conceived as book rooms, but arranged in facing lines in a dedicated Book Room.17 Sadly Harry Clarke had himself died nearly ten years earlier so never saw them there. This study serves as a timely reminder of their unique importance in the context of Irish war memorial studies.
Nicola Gordon Bowe © 2015
NOTES
1.See Nicola Gordon Bowe, Harry Clarke: The Life & Work (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1989; new ed. Dublin; History Press, 2012) for full details; also Martin Steenson, A Bibliographical Checklist of the Work of Harry Clarke (London: Books & Things, 2003).
2.For the origins of Maunsel and Company, see Clare Hutton (ed.), The Irish Book in the Twentieth Century (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2004), pp. 36–46. Maunsel was the middle name of Joseph Maunsell Hone, a founding co-director of the firm with Roberts, ‘who really ran the company throught its existence – between 1905 and 1920 as Maunsel, and from December 1920 until 1925 as Maunsel and Roberts’ (p. 44).
3.See Bowe, Harry Clarke (Dublin: Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, 1979), pp. 63–65 and Bowe, Harry Clarke: His Graphic Art (Mountrath: Dolmen Press, 1983), pp. 112–116.
4.Thomas Bodkin, ‘The Art of Harry Clarke’, The Studio (November 1919), Vol. 79, no. 320, pp. 44–52.
5.Harraps’ prospectus, quoted in Bowe 1983, p. 52.
6.‘Books of the Week’, The Irish Times, November 20th 1925, p. 3.
7.See Bowe 2012, p. 203.
8.Kevin Myers, ‘An Irishman’s Diary’, The Irish Times, December 14th 1989, p. 13. Clarke’s poignant war memorial windows of the period include those in Killiney, Co. Dublin, Nantwich, Cheshire, Wexford town and in Gorey, Co. Wexford (see Bowe 2012, pp. 312–9). The figure of St. Martin (1922) in Gorey resembles the saintly warrior in the Memorial Records borders.
9.Illustrated in Bowe 1983, p. 59.
10.Viscount Ypres, Foreword, dated 28th December 1922 and Introduction in Ireland’s Memorial Records, 1914–1918 (Dublin: Maunsel and Roberts, 1923), Vol. 1. Lord French was created Earl of Ypres in June 1922 after resigning as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in April 1921.
11.See Bowe, ‘Ireland’s Memorial Records, 1914-1918’, Ireland of the Welcomes, November/December 2006, pp. 18–23. With thanks to Miss Eva C. Barnard, secretary of the Committee, who compiled the list of names.
12.Two of the woodblocks faced with Clarke’s designs photo-engraved on metal survive from Miss Barnard’s private collection.
13.For Pender, see Bowe and Elizabeth Cumming, The Arts and Crafts Movements in Dublin and Edinburgh, 1885–1925 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998), p. 126 and Bowe, ‘Lord Dunsany 1878–1957. Portrait of a Collector’, The Decorative Arts Society 1850 to the Present, 28 (2004), pp. 126–147.
14.See Bowe and Cumming 1998, pp. 174–5 and Bowe, ‘Percy Oswald Reeves 1870–1967, Metalworker and Enamellist: Forgotten Master of the Irish Arts and Crafts Movement’, Omnium Gatherum 1994, Journal Number Eighteen (1994), The Decorative Arts Society 1850 to the Present, pp. 61–68.
15.P. O. Reeves, ‘Irish Arts and Crafts’, The Studio (October 1917), Vol. 72, no. 295, pp. 15–22.
16.See Alastair Duncan, Art Deco (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994), pp. 7–10.
17.Letter dated 21 January 1936, sent by Lutyens from London to Miss H.G. Wilson, by then secretary of the Irish National War Memorial Committee in Dublin, referred to by Dr Helmers in her text. I am grateful to her for drawing my attention to this.
Introduction
‘Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.’
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
The Missing
For several years, when visiting Dublin, I attempted to spend an afternoon at the Irish National Memorial Gardens at Islandbridge, but there was always some barrier. Once, it was dramatic. When Queen Elizabeth visited the city in 2011, I walked along the Liffey only to find the memorial secured and guarded. I should also clarify my first statement: I attempted to visit the Irish National Memorial Gardens at Islandbridge once I became aware that the gardens existed, for five years of travels to the city had come and gone before I knew the memorial was there. It’s not featured on Streetwise Dublin or on city centre maps; tourist maps show bright bus lines circling from O’Connell Street to Kilmainham Gaol, but there’s typically a large blank space on the map where the memorial should be. My own curiosity about the memorial comes from an unlikely source. I have been teaching and researching the poems, memoirs and art of the First World War for two decades, and my interest was piqued by an extended scene set at the gardens in Paul Murray’s novel Skippy Dies, published in 2010. In that novel, erstwhile history teacher Howard
