Harry Clarke Biography

Henry Patrick Clarke RHA (1889-1931) was an Irish stained-glass artist and book illustrator. Born in Dublin, he was a leading figure in the Irish Arts and Crafts Movement.

His work was influenced by both the Art Nouveau and Art Deco movements. His stained glass was particularly informed by the French Symbolist movement.

He was born on 17 March 1889, the younger son and third child of Joshua Clarke and Brigid (née MacGonigal) Clarke. Joshua Clarke was a church decorator who moved to Dublin from Leeds in 1877 and started a decorating business, Joshua Clarke & Sons, which later incorporated a stained glass division. Through his work with his father, Clarke was exposed to many schools of art but Art Nouveau in particular.

Clarke was educated at the Model School in Marlborough Street, Dublin and Belvedere College, which he left in 1905. He was devastated by the death of his mother in 1903 when he was only 14 years old. Clarke was then apprenticed into his father's studio and attended evening classes in the Metropolitan College of Art and Design. 

At the art school in Dublin, Clarke met fellow artist and teacher, Margaret Crilley. They married on 31 October 1914 and moved into a flat at 33 North Frederick Street. In subsequent years the Clarkes lived in various locations in Dublin, including a semi-detached house in Cabra in which Margaret Clarke painted her husband at work. The Clarkes had three children, Michael, David, and Ann.

Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen was his first printed work in 1916. It included 16 colour plates and more than 24 halftone illustrations. This was followed by illustrations for an edition of Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination: the first version of that title was restricted to halftone illustrations, while a second with eight colour plates and more than 24 halftone images was published in 1923.

This 1923 edition made his reputation as a book illustrator, during the golden age of gift-book illustration in the first quarter of the twentieth century. It was followed by editions of The Year's at the Spring, with 12 colour plates and more than 14 monotone images, Charles Perrault's Fairy Tales of Perrault, and Goethe's Faust, with eight colour plates and more than 70 halftone and duotone images. His final book, Selected Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne, was published in 1928.