Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART Auction Wednesday 24th March 2021

A masterpiece of the Arts & Crafts movement, this is one of three extant stained glass panels made by Clarke to illustrate one of his favourite scenes from literature and be mounted in a cabinet purpose-made by the renowned Dublin furniture maker, James Hicks. The concept of using two single panels, intricately worked in a microscopically demanding technique with such imaginative skill, and then ‘registered’ to provide a magical scene of astounding intricacy, and in this case, gruesome foreboding, was unique to Clarke. Apart from this time factor, such was the risk of breakage that he only made such tiny autonomous panels between 1915 and 1923, although he had been incorporating narrative detail into full-scale windows ever since his well-known Honan Chapel series in Cork (1915-1917). It seems likely that this panel was made for inclusion in an anthology which Harraps, the Lon- don publishers, planned to illustrate using Clarke’s narrative stained glass panels beside his better known watercolour and pen and ink work. The idea was scrapped in favour of twelve new colour and twelve new black and white plates, published as The Year’s at the Spring in 1920, and, two years later, the same number of illustrations (also on paper) for a uniform edi- tion of The Fairy Tales of Perrault . When the panel was exhibited at the 6th exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland in Dublin in 1921, it was bought by Albert Wood, a barrister and friend and patron of Clarke’s, who had it mounted by Hicks, just as his friend Thomas Bodkin had done with his Song of the Mad Prince panel in 1917, and another friend, Sir Robert Woods, would do with his Bottom and Titania panel in 1922. Influenced by the exotic productions of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes then in such vogue, it depicts the sadistic king, scimitar in hand, lying in wait for his innocent bride as she dances unsuspectingly over a garlanded bridge. Her fate if suggested by the gleaming blade he brandishes, the bloody orb below her darkened by ominous silhouettes, the wildly painted whorls in the dramatic sky and two white birds in the foreground vainly trying to escape. Dr Nicola Gordon-Bowe (1948 - 2018) James Hicks (1886 - 1936), is arguably Ireland’s best known cabinet maker. A virtuoso craftsman, he was born into the furniture making business, his father, Patrick being a master chair-maker. James trained in the cabinet making workshops of Tottenham Court Road in Lon- don before returning to Dublin in 1894 to set up his own business on Lower Pembroke Street. The firm rapidly became the leading cabinet-making firm in the country. Describing himself as ‘Cabinet Manufacturer, Collector and Restorer of Chippendale, Adam and Sheraton Furniture’, he included among his clients members of the British and Swedish Royal families as well as the aristocracy. In 1928 Hicks won the commission from President Cosgrave to fit out the Dail and Senate chambers in Leinster House and work was also done in the Four Courts and the National Library of Ireland. Aras an Uachtaráin, official home of the President of Ireland, also has a number of important pieces by Hicks including a set of magnificent dining chairs in the Chippendale style.