Dubliners accustomed to having a morning coffee under the cheery brightness of some very nice stained-glass windows may have lately been surprised to find that not only are these windows very nice, but also very valuable. The windows in question are the six stained-glass artworks by the world-acclaimed Irish artist Harry Clarke (1889-1931) in Bewley’s Oriental Café in Grafton Street, Dublin and which are estimated to be worth over a million euro. Where there is serious money there is often serious disagreement and so it was that the question of the ownership of Harry’s windows ended up recently in a Dublin courtroom.
The dispute was between the premises’ landlord, Johnny Ronan of RGRE (Ronan Group Real Estate), and the premises’ tenant, Bewley’s Café. Whereas it is obvious to most people that the Parthenon Frieze belongs to Greece, despite the British Museum’s arguments to the contrary, the ownership of Harry’s stained-glass windows was not as clear cut. In court, Bewley’s argued that the windows are not windows but moveable artworks which are not part of the premises. Furthermore, they argued, they are decorative and ornamental and are not used as windows. One does not have to be a lawyer to see the flaws in these arguments, but in the first hearing in January 2023 the court awarded four of the windows to the landlord, RGRE, and two to Bewley’s Cafe. However, on subsequent appeal by the landlord the court ruled that they were all ‘part and parcel’ of the building and therefore all of them the property of RGRE.
The stylish period shopfront of Bewley’s Café in Grafton Street, Dublin
These six windows were completed in 1928 to coincide with the Café’s first opening. As Nicola Gordon Bowe observes in her monumental and lavishly illustrated Harry Clarke, the Life and Work, (The History Press, 2012) the artist took great trouble over these windows, ‘particularly the four showing the Orders of Architecture in which Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite columns are adorned and topped by vases full of flowers’. The windows are bright, uplifting, attractive and translucent, and work well as an aid to that mood of meditation which can affect us in the early morning when having a coffee and mulling over the difficulties the day promises to bring. Tranquil and soothing, they are very different from the style of many of his other creations which incline toward the mythical, the religious, and even the macabre.
Bowe also quotes an Irish Times report of January that year that described the windows as a delightful artwork ‘destined to remain in Dublin in a business house, where Dublin’s citizens will have frequent opportunities of seeing it’. So why the court fuss over who owns them if they continue to remain in situ where for nearly a hundred years they have graced the dining hall of one of Dublin’s iconic buildings?
Developer Johnny Ronan, landlord of Bewleys Café in Grafton Street, Dublin won ownership of the Clarke windows in a highly-publicised court case against the tenant Bewley Cafes
But there’s the rub. How sure can we be that they are ‘destined to remain in Dublin’, as confidently stated by the Irish Times in 1928? The history of art is beset by issues of ownership and the vagaries of the art market, and the court judgement cited above carries little reassurance that at some time in the future Harry’s windows will not find a new owner. Everything has its price, even the ineffably beautiful, and especially the valuable ineffably beautiful. The British Museum has stubbornly hung on to its looted treasures for well over two hundred years now, but its arguments are beginning to sound increasingly thin. It is likely that the famous Parthenon Frieze will return to Greece sooner or later, an outcome which will be applauded by anyone appalled by the way they were stripped off the acropolis by Lord Elgin in 1812. Not to be applauded would be the relocation of Harry’s six Bewley windows, something not impossible now that they have been deemed legally someone else’s property. The gods of commerce are notoriously fickle and a merchant prince like Johnny Ronan may have to consider his options should those gods prove unkind to him in the future. Is it fanciful to think that we may someday see the Bewley windows on display in a foreign museum, like another great Harry Clarke work which was lost to Ireland in the last century? Surely not.
The Eve of Saint Agnes
Well, not so surely not. That other great Clarke piece referred to above was created on foot of a commission from the Irish Free State’s Department of Industry and Commerce in June 1925. Harry Clake’s studio was asked to design a stained-glass window to be located in the newly launched International Labour Building of the League of Nations in Geneva. This was a very prestigious commission, which Harry’s studio was delighted to receive. He visited the site and had submitted designs by May 1927. The window, finished in 1929, comprised fifteen panels, each dedicated to the works of an Irish writer of note, among them James Joyce, Sean O’Casey, and Liam O’Flaherty, all chosen by Harry with assistance of WB Yeats and other leading Irish literary figures. It was intended as a declaration of the arrival of a new and artistically vibrant nation on the world’s stage.
The Irish Government seemed enthusiastic at first. However, after the finished window was viewed by government ministers, Harry received a letter on 26 September 1930 from President Cosgrave, who gave it as his opinion that the O’Flaherty panel, which included a depiction of a scantily-clad woman, would need to be replaced. Despite the artist’s readiness to meet Cosgrave or other government representatives, he did not receive any response before he succumbed to tuberculosis in January 1931. The window was eventually bought by the government with the intention of locating it, not in Geneva, but in Government Buildings in Merrion Street, well out of public view, where, in Nicola Bowe’s words it ‘could be sniffed over’ by those who disapproved of anything resembling avant-garde artwork. Eventually in 1932 his widow, Margaret, was allowed to buy it back and it was then loaned by the Clarke family to the Dublin City Gallery (The Municipal Gallery) in Dublin, where it languished in storage, unseen. Finally, on being exhibited in London at the Fine Arts Society in May 1988, it was acquired by the Wolfsonian Foundation of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, Miami, Florida.
So it was that Harry Clarke fell foul of the conservative values of the Irish Free State, and his Geneva Window was lost to Ireland. Against that regret, it must be said that this artwork was never intended to remain in Ireland. It was to be sent abroad to represent all that was great about Ireland’s modern literary genius. In effect, strategically placed in one of Europe’s important institutions, it was to be a cultural ambassador to the world at large. It carried the message that Ireland was a vibrant new nation and not the cultural backwater it had been prior to independence where, in 1918, Yeats had written angrily about ‘the beating down of the wise / and the great art beaten down’. The Geneva Window is a truly splendid piece of propaganda art, as the Wolfsonian buyers cannily recognised and it is well-placed in their museum. Nevertheless, it is a loss for Ireland, for although there is today no need to vaunt Ireland’s successes in world literature, and therefore the propagandist element is somewhat irrelevant, it is still a powerful work that would be a significant addition to any gallery in Ireland, while its history would be a reminder to the nation how narrow moralistic views can do great mischief in the appreciation of great art.
Harry Clarke (1889-1931) was well appreciated in his own short lifetime of 42 years – he died of TB – as a prolific creator of religious stained-glass works. His windows can be seen in churches all over Ireland and abroad
As mentioned, Harry’s tuberculosis worsened during the final working of the Geneva Window and he had to travel to a Swiss sanatorium in the hope of some alleviation, leaving his assistants to complete the project. His death in 1931 at least spared him the indignities visited on his masterpiece. We can appreciate now that the ‘moral climate’ of the Ireland of that time was not ready for such a daring piece, even though it was an Ireland intent on showing itself ready to be an independent nation, outward-looking and newly free from foreign domination, politically and culturally. And although it is tempting to use the old argument about a prophet never being appreciated in his own country, this is not the case with Harry Clarke. Harry was well appreciated in his own short lifetime of 42 years as a prolific creator of religious stained-glass works. His windows can be seen in churches all over Ireland. Abroad too, especially in Africa, as described in a recent book of essays on the artist’s work, Harry Clarke and Artistic Visions of the New State, edited by Angela Griffith, Margaret Helmers and Roisin Kennedy (Irish Academic Press, 2019), in Kenya, Zambia, Nigeria, and South Africa where his work was in great demand during what is now seen as the golden age of Irish missionary activity from the 1930s to the 1960s.
It is also tempting to decry the narrowness and prudery of post-independent Ireland for the fate of the Geneva Window, but again, this would be the error so often committed of ascribing to past times the rather more enlightened attitudes of the Ireland of today. Without doubt, the years after the establishment of the Irish State were indeed socially conservative times but the fate of the Geneva window stemmed from more than mere prudery. As mentioned, Harry’s inclusion of a semi-naked woman in his window to represent Liam O’Flaherty’s work did not go down well with an Irish government that felt that the image of Ireland to be projected on the world stage should be more in accordance with that of an Island of saints and scholars. Nor did the depiction of a red-nosed Joxer Daley, one of Sean O’Casey’s creations, with a bottle of Guinness sticking out of his pocket, sit well with Government concerns about perpetuating the stage-Irish image of the drunken Paddy. The question of imagery was a sensitive issue in the context of the project being a State-funded initiative. The fact that our modern Ireland is little concerned about risqué images proves how far ahead Harry was of his times. A little too far perhaps, as so often happens with many great artists.
Harry Clarke’s numerous works can be seen in churches and other buildings all over Ireland and beyond. This work, Madonna and Child, can be seen at The Church for the Assumption, Bride Street, Wexford
Born in Dublin in 1889, Harry Clarke worked in stained-glass and book illustration. He studied at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art and then moved to London to work as a book illustrator. He first illustrated Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales and his next work on Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination extended his reputation for imaginative and carefully-worked detail. Despite his short life he left a truly extensive legacy of illustration and stained-glass artwork. Certainly, he was an artist of the highest calibre, of whom Ireland is today immensely proud. The reaction to his Geneva window is regrettable, however much we make allowances for the attitudes of the time. It cannot but have added to the stresses of his final days.
The celebrated Harry Clarke stained glass window in Bewley’s Cafe in Grafton Street, Dublin, the subject of a court dispute
And now you must do yourself the favour of going for a coffee in Bewley’s Oriental Café in Dublin’s Grafton Street and view those wonderful windows, if you have not already done so. You need not be an art buff to be bowled over. Their effect is immediate. And while you are there, you can regale yourself with works by Paddy Campbell, Pauline Bewick, Graham Knuttle and Jim Fitzpatrick. You then might have the time to saunter up to the Municipal Gallery on Parnell Square to be enthralled by Harry’s treatment of that great poem The Eve of St Agnes written by John Keats, whose life was also tragically cut short at a young age by the same dreadful disease that ended the career of one of Ireland’s greatest artists.
Note. The Túr Gloine exhibition is showing in the National Gallery until 12 January 2025. An Túr Gloine (The Tower of Glass) was the studio founded in 1903 by artist Sarah Purser. The exhibition focuses on that great flowering of stained-glass art in the early years of the last century and explores An Túr Gloine’s co-operative practice and the rich variety and individuality of its stained- glass designs. Featured artists include Wilhelmina Geddes, Michael Healy, Catherine O’Brien, Alfred E. Child, Hubert McGoldrick, Ethel Rhind and Evie Hone, and the exhibition allows an insight into Harry Clarke’s place within that flowering. Admission free.
