questions for further research.
Chapter One situates Harry Clarke’s commission to create the illustrations within the major political conflicts of the war years, 1914–18. Although a single chapter of this book cannot do justice to the complexities of the conflicts of the First World War and the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, it is necessary to envision Ireland’s Memorial Records emerging from differing national allegiances. On the one hand, supporters of the British government wanted to remember the service of the Irish in the First World War as heroic; on the other hand, Irish nationalists found such service to be traitorous. I would hope that readers unfamiliar with the relationship of these two significant events might be encouraged to read further in the many excellent histories of both conflicts.
Chapter Two positions Ireland’s Memorial Records within various art historical movements, including the development of war art, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and popular silent film. In addition, Ireland’s Memorial Records were connected to an important movement by England’s Imperial War Graves Commission1 and London’s Royal Academy of Arts to establish a common memorial language, given that nation’s unprecedented struggle to honour the millions of dead. Accordingly, I introduce the publication of Imperial War Graves Commission cemetery registers by Douglas Cockerell to this discussion.1
Chapter Three examines the detailed drawings for each of the nine plates in Ireland’s Memorial Records. The record of an artist’s thought is often found within the work itself. Clarke did not leave any written or sketched record of his commission, other than the printed pages of the books. Bowe, who had access to the family papers as she worked on her many detailed studies of his stained glass and graphic art, reports that there are no known extant sketches, preliminary drawings, or correspondence related to the commission.5 I have relied on my research into First World War posters and my previous publications on the visual culture of the war to build an interpretation for readers.
Chapter Four takes up the story of the Irish National War Memorial Gardens, which I contend were designed as an archive, a Palladian construction of four bookrooms where copies of Ireland’s Memorial Records could be housed and consulted. Sir Edwin Lutyens, who drew up the architectural plans for the Irish National War Memorial Gardens, replaces Clarke as the protagonist in this chapter, for Clarke passed away in 1931, just as the ground was broken for the memorial in Islandbridge. This chapter concludes with reflections on the irony of the two forgotten spaces: Ireland’s Memorial Records and the bookrooms of the Irish National War Memorial Gardens.
My position as an American researcher has allowed me to weigh the facts as I have found them. I have treated Harry Clarke’s engravings as I have treated other aspects of visual culture that I have written about in the past: examining the way that the illustrations came into being, the details of the artistic work, and how the set of Ireland’s Memorial Records are displayed. This is a work about rhetoric and the particular rhetorical trope of epediectic, or display. It is not a work about politics. That Harry Clarke’s illustrations for Ireland’s Memorial Records were intended to be housed in an Irish national war memorial does not mean that this war memorial is being elevated above other memorial sites in Dublin or Ireland.
Although the legacy of the war once known as the Great War is still contentious, we need to remind ourselves that Harry Clarke was in no way celebrating war and that Ireland’s Memorial Records are not instruments of propaganda. Clarke was creating art – and art matters. Art mattered just as much in 1923, when the books were published, as it matters now. Art can restore the soul and refresh the senses. Art can make us think and see the world around us in a new way. Clarke’s decorative designs gave voice to his intellect and his sentiment, and they should engage our minds as well as release our emotions. If they ask us what we believe, so much the better, as that is one province of art. Ireland’s Memorial Records are distinctive; they are the only national roll of honour completed by an internationally renowned artist to emerge from the 1914–18 conflict. This singular feature is a distinction for Ireland, for Dublin, and for art.
1The Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC) was created by Royal Charter in 1917. In 1960, its name became the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Throughout this book I refer to it by the name in use from 1917–39.
NOTES
1.P. Murray, Skippy Dies (New York: Macmillan, 2010), pp.552–53.
2.E. M. Cope, Commentary on the Rhetoric of Aristotle, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1877).
3.H. Clarke, National Library of Ireland, MS 39,202/B, contains diaries from 1914 and 1919.
4.J. Horne and E. Madigan, Towards Commemoration: Ireland in War and Revolution, 1912-1923, (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2013); K. Jeffery, Ireland and the Great War, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000); F. D’Arcy, Remembering the War Dead: British Commonwealth and International War Graves in Ireland Since 1914 (Dublin: The Stationery Office, 2007); P. Murray, Skippy Dies.
5.. N. Bowe, personal conversation, June 2014.
The Irish in Gallipoli
Francis Ledwidge, 1917
Where Aegean cliffs with bristling menace front
The Threatening splendor of that isley sea
Lighted by Troy’s last shadow, where the first
Hero kept watch and the last Mystery
Shook with dark thunder, hark the battle brunt!
A nation speaks, old Silences are burst.
Neither for lust of glory nor new throne
This thunder and this lightning of our wrath
Waken these frantic echoes, not for these
Our cross with England’s mingle, to be blown
On Mammon’s threshold; we but war when war
Serves Liberty and Justice, Love and Peace.
Who said that such an emprise could be vain?
Were they not one with Christ Who strove and died?
Let Ireland weep but not for sorrow. Weep
That by her sons a land is sanctified
For Christ Arisen, and angels once again
Come back like exile birds to guard their sleep.
I
Things Fall Apart: Art Emerges from Conflict
1919. In Dublin, the artist Harry Clarke is struggling with a commission to illustrate an anthology of poetry edited by Lettice d’Oyly Walters, titled The Year’s at the Spring. Harrap’s in London has just published Clarke’s macabre illustrations
