Collection: Harry Clarke

Harry Clarke was born in Dublin on St Patrick's Day, 1889, into a house where glass was cut, fired and leaded as ordinary trade — his father ran a church-decorating business on North Frederick Street. He was apprenticed into it at eighteen, won a travelling scholarship to study medieval glass at Chartres in 1914, and was dead at forty-one.

What he did to the glass

Clarke's colour is usually described as though it were a pigment he alone possessed. It was a process. He took flashed glass — clear glass with a wafer-thin skin of colour fused to one face — painted out what he wanted to keep, and bathed the sheet in acid in stages, so a single piece could shade from deep ruby to near-white without a lead line crossing it. Then he plated: two differently coloured etched sheets leaded as one, so light passes through two filters before it reaches you. That is where the Clarke blue comes from. Not a colour — a depth.

The windows and the books

The commission that made him was the Honan Chapel at University College Cork: eleven of its nineteen windows, finished by 1917. His St Gobnait of 1916 is the most photographed — Gobnait being the patron of bees, he set her in tracery of honeycomb. More than a hundred and thirty windows followed, across sixteen Irish counties.

Most people meet him through the books. Andersen's Fairy Tales in 1916, Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination in 1919 — twenty-four monochrome plates, no colour at all, and still the definitive visual reading of Poe a century later — then Perrault in 1922 and Goethe's Faust in 1925. His publisher called the Faust drawings "full of stench and steaming horrors". Clarke's reply was that they were "terribly, terribly sincere".

Why these can be printed at all

Clarke died in January 1931, so under the life-plus-seventy rule his work has been in the public domain in Ireland and across the EU since 1 January 2002. The plates below are printed on 250gsm archival matte paper with pigment inks, framed in solid wood or unframed. Free worldwide shipping.

The longer story — the Honan windows, the window the Irish State refused to send to Geneva, and the grave at Chur with no headstone — is in our piece on Harry Clarke, and there is an illustrated guide to his life, with a map of the windows you can still go and stand in front of, on the Harry Clarke artist page. Part of our full Irish Art Prints collection.