Clarke-style Windows

“In no time there was a large studio successfully producing Clarke-style windows to his designs or under his supervision.”

This post and this slide show is about a set of windows in a church in Leixlip, Co Kildare. The music is How Can I Keep from Singing by Enya ©, used with permission. I am hoping she will like me using her transcendent sound for this purpose. (You may need to click on Watch on YouTube for the full screen version.)

The Leixlip stained glass perfectly illustrates what a Clarke-style window is all about. The quote in the first paragraph is from Nicola Gordon Bowe’s Introduction to the Gazetteer of Irish Stained Glass. The foremost scholar on all matters relating to Harry Clarke (above, in a portrait by his wife, Margaret Clarke) and stained glass of the Irish Arts and Crafts era, she has researched his output exhaustively, and helped us to understand that he ran a busy studio with over 30 employees and was by no means able to design or paint all the windows himself. 

Of course he did many windows – about 150 in all – but if they were his windows, he signed them and they were expensive. Above is a detail from his Terenure masterpiece, The Virgin in Glory, to give you an idea of the difference between the real thing and a Clarke-style window. In addition to that, after his father died in 1921, he and his brother Walter ran the business – Joshua Clarke and Sons (it wasn’t called The Harry Clarke Studios until 1930) – with Walter looking after the business end and Harry in charge of the artistic output. Harry produced his own windows on the side, as it were, paying for materials and glazing time, but charging differently. To fulfil the demand for stained glass windows from around the country (and indeed from the USA, Australia, Britain, and other countries) Harry gathered around him a group of talented artists and trained some of them to reproduce his style. Some of the artists he found himself – they were either fellow students/friends at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art (like Austin Molloy, or the group below showing Harry top left) or had arrived through recommendations (Philip Deegan from Worthing), or, like Millicent Girling, had taken one of Harry’s own classes. He taught design at the DMSA for a couple of years in the early 1920s and according to Nano Reid, one of his students, all the students were under his spell and there was a wave of Harry Clarke Style illustrations.*

However they got there, in the mid-1920s Kathleen Quigly and Leo Cartwright had joined the other accomplished artists working under Harry’s supervision. While not all the windows the Joshua Clarke studios produced in this period were ‘in the Clarke style,’ many were, and there was huge pressure to produce a Harry Clarke window although not always the budget to go with the aspiration. 

The windows in Our Lady’s Nativity Church in Leixlip, Co Kildare, fall into this category. They were installed in 1925 by Joshua Clarke and Sons and consist mainly of clear and light green quarries, with decorative borders. Each two-light window has a fleur-de-lis design in blue and a Latin inscription at the bottom, while the top panels feature two small scenes from the lives of Mary and Christ. The glass is of the inexpensive kind and the repetitiveness of the decoration meant that most of the windows could be assembled by apprentices or glaziers, while one of the studio artists produced the small scenes.

Who did them? On balance, my guess would be Philip Deegan. He seems to have been the go-to artist for Clarke-style windows. Kathleen Quiqly was also there at the time, but she was mainly assisting Harry with his own windows. Deegan was very capable of designing a near-Harry, as some of the drawings attributed to him in the TCD Clarke Archive attest. Take a look at his sketches for windows here, here and here, for example (sorry, not allowed to reproduce the images online). Not only was he working at the studios, he also signed up for Harry’s design classes and provided illustrations for the Dublin Magazine. I’ve only managed to find one of these (thank you, the amazing Patrick Hawe!) but the facial expressions remind me forcibly of the scourger in the Scourging of Christ window. 

However, that’s speculation on my part and it could have been one of the other artists, or even more than one artist. The small scenes are lacking in Harry’s signature complexity and deeply emotive expression, but taken as a whole they make a charming sequence and deserve to be more visible than they are. 

For much more on Harry Clarke and on stained glass, go to our Stained Glass Navigation Page.

*Quoted in The Metropolitan School of Art, 1900-1923: (Part 2) by John Turpin. Dublin Historical Review, Vol 38, No 2, Mar 1985