Читать книгу Harry Clarke’s War - Marguerite Helmers - Страница 8

Foreword

In context: Harry Clarke’s decorative borders for the Irish National War Memorial Committee’s Books of the Dead, Ireland’s Memorial Records, 1914–1918

In 1923, when these eight volumes were privately published by George Roberts of Maunsel and Roberts, Harry Clarke (1889–1931) was at the peak of his all-too-short artistic career. Aged thirty-four, he had already published a series of critically acclaimed illustrated books with George G. Harrap in London, issued in limited luxury editions as well as regular editions.1 He had also drawn a series of illustrations to Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, which would have been his first published book with Maunsel & Company (as the firm was originally known2), had not the blocks of the main illustrations, the title page, and the head and tailpiece originals perished when the Dublin publisher’s premises were destroyed by fire in the 1916 Easter Rising.3

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 interlaced framework on the title page is particularly vigorous yet restrained in its flattened overlay, as 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.