Harry Clarke RHA (1889-1931)
Bluebeard's Last Wife
Miniature stained glass panel in an inlaid mahogany, walnut and tortoishell cabinet, made by Dublin cabinet maker James Hicks
28 x 14.5cm (11 x...

Harry Clarke RHA (1889-1931)
Bluebeard's Last Wife
Miniature stained glass panel in an inlaid mahogany, walnut and tortoishell cabinet, made by Dublin cabinet maker James Hicks
28 x 14.5cm (11 x 5¾)
Signed and dated 1921.
Backlit by full -size LED light panel
Cabinet: 43cm high, 39cm wide, 28cm deep

Provenance: Purchased at the 1921 Arts & Crafts Society, cat. no. 292 Exhibition by Albert Wood, a barrister, friend and patron of Clarkes for £20 and he had it mounted in the Hick's cabinet. Thence by descent and sold in these rooms, 9/12/1998, cat. no. 62; also 5/12/2011, cat no.113 where purchased by the current owner.

 

Exhibited: Arts & Crafts Society of Ireland 6th Annual Exhibition 1921, cat. no. 292;Exposition d'Art Irlandais, Galeries Barbazanges, Paris 1922 cat. no. 258; Harry Clarke Retrospective Exhibition, The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College Dublin, November-December 1979, cat. no. 167; The Arts & Crafts Movement in Europe and America, 1800-1920, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, December 2004-April 2005; this major exhibition toured to Delaware Art Museum from June 2005-September 2005 and The Cleveland Museum of Art from October 2005-January 2006. Clarke's piece was one of only a handful of Irish works included in the exhibition; A Celebration of Irish Art & Modernism, The Ava Gallery, Clandeboye, Co. Down, June- September 2011, cat. No. 4; The Arts & Crafts Movement - Making it Irish, McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, February - June 2016, cat. no. 160.

 

Literature: Nicola Gordon Bowe, The Life and Works of Harry Clarke 1989, fig 120, p.136; Nicola Gordon Bowe and Elizabeth Cumming The Arts and Crafts Movements in Dublin and Edinburgh 1885 - 1925 cat. no. 30, p.103; Nicola Gordon-Bowe, Harry Clarke, cat. no. 167 p.110; Wendy Kaplan, The Arts & Crafts Movement in Europe and America; Design for the Modern World, Thames and Hudson, 2005, p296, full page colour illustration p.294; Lucy Costigan and Michael Cullen Strangest Genius - the Stained Glass of Harry Clarke 2010, full page illustration p.291; Vera Kreilkamp, The Arts & Crafts Movement - Making it Irish 2016 cat. no. 160, illus. p.288

 

Eleanor Flegg writing a preview of the present lot in The Irish Independent (26/2/2021) explained the story thus -

'Bluebeard's last wife should have known better. He already had been married to several wives and nobody knew what had become of them. That was her first warning. Then he told her not to open the door to his secret chamber, while allowing her access to the key. Her curiousity would not be denied.

Finally, having discovered what was in the chamber (dead wives), she orchestrated his downfall and became mistress of all his estate. Bluebeard was a nasty piece of work, but his last wife was also a woman to be reckoned with. She was the one that got away.'

 

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 London 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 edition 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 London 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.

 

 

 

 

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