Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 1st June 2022

62 38 HARRY CLARKE RHA (1889-1931) St Hubert, St Luke and St George (1927) Colour Scheme for the memorial window, St. Brigid’s Church of Ireland, Castleknock Watercolour, 34.5 x 22cm (13½ x 8¾’’) Provenance: With Grants Fine Art Gallery, label verso; with The Fine Art Society, London, label verso. Exhibited: ‘The Stained Glass of Harry Clarke’, The Fine Art Society, 1988, catalogue no.46. € 6,000 - 10,000 In May 1927 when the commission for the Brooke memorial window for St Brigid’s Church of Ireland, Castleknock had been confirmed Harry Clarke noted in his diary ‘…bear in mind to give the maximum light and rich colour. Excellent light and po- sition. Will stand rich colour and treatment… Subjects in base could be seen.’ (1) When Harry Clarke and other stained glass artists of the period were in the process of designing a window, a key aspect was the creation of small-scale designs (usually made at the scale of one inch to the foot) to establish the composition and to determine the colour scheme; this example falls into the latter category. Raymond Brooke had commissioned Clarke to create a window to commemorate military, hunting and artistic members of his family. Three male saints were selected: St Hubert is depicted in the centre light and is in memory of Sir George Frederick Brooke, 1st Baronet of Summerton (the name of their home in Castleknock) who although a wine merchant and banker pre- ferred to spend his time hunting, maintaining a prestigious pack of harriers that later became the North Kildare Harriers, and hence the choice of St Hubert, patron saint of hunters (note also Clarke’s inclusion of a poised hunting dog in profile). Accord- ing to his daughter Rose Brooke, Sir George was a great admirer of Harry Clarke’s work and often used to go into his studio.’ (2) The left light depicts St George, and it was in memory of the only son from Sir George’s first marriage, also named George, who was a member of the Irish Guards and who died at the Battle of Aisne in 1914. The choice of St George being appropriate not only as it is the deceased soldier’s name but also of course as he is a notable soldier saint, who along with St Michael, is one of the most popular saints for war memorial depictions. The right light was erected in memory of Sir George’s second wife Emily Alma (née Barton) a deeply religious and artistic individual who died several years ahead of both her husband and step-son. In addition to the full-length depictions of the three saints, each of the lights contain a predella panel at the base, and the one beneath St Luke shows the saint in his role as patron saint of artists, standing at an easel painting a portrait of the Virgin and Child. The apex of each light accommodates an angel bearing an heraldic shield, and behind and above them, in the three span- drels which comprise the tracery, is what the late Dr Nicola Gordon Bowe (the leading authority on Harry Clarke), referred to as ‘a deep blue sky threaded with gossamer and brightly coloured galactic phenomena’, a visual device she noted that Clarke had employed in his previous window for Tullycross Church but used here, in her opinion, to even greater effect. (3) Dr David Caron 1. Quoted in Nicola Gordon Bowe, ‘ Harry Clarke 1889–1931: His Life and Work ’, PhD thesis, University of Dublin, 1991, vol. 2, p. 743. 2. Ibid, vol. 2, p. 769 (quoting a letter from Rose Brooke to Nicola Gordon Bowe, 24 February 1974). 3. Nicola Gordon Bowe, Harry Clarke, The Life and Work (Dublin: The History Press, 2018), p. 268.