Online indexes do exist: gloine.ie, a database of windows in Church of Ireland churches, is useful if glitchy Lucy Costigan and Michael Cullen’s is a trove of information on the location of Clarke’s works, among them the Honan Chapel at UCC, a building just emerging from major restoration.ĭetail from Harry Clarke’s The Song of the Mad PrinceĪs the Gazetteer shows, Clarke is not the only stained glass artist in town, and with more than 2,500 entries, you can see how Irish artists really shone. However, the fact that most of us travel with a smartphone these days does make me hungry for an online version to search by artist as well as location. Essentially it is an extended index, which makes it a handy travel companion if your own staycations involve church-spotting and a more general seeking out of artistic and architectural significant sites. Gordon Bowe, who championed scholarship in, and passion for stained glass died in 2018 and Wynne, keeper and research curator at the National Gallery of Ireland, in 2003. And so it is Caron who has overseen the updated edition, adding an essay exploring the art from the mid-20th century to the present, and a trove of glowing photographs, most of them by Jozef Vrtiel.Īs its name suggests, the main part of the Gazetteer is devoted to a county-by-Ĭounty listing of where to find Irish stained glass. The original edition of the Gazetteer, by Nicola Gordon Bowe, Michael Wynne and David Caron was published in 1988. The world over, stained glass shows how the right combination of light, line and colour can take your breath away, and Irish artists have been particularly good at it. The Geneva Window is pictured in the latest edition of the Gazetteer of Irish Stained Glass, alongside other examples of Clarke’s wonderful work including his Eve of St Agnes, on view in Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery. Suffice to say, the window, which celebrates Irish writers, was considered scandalous by 1930s politicians, although what is perhaps even more scandalous is that it wasn’t lost to Ireland until as recently as the 1980s.
The story of how this masterpiece came to be in the Wolfsonian Museum, rather than at the League of Nations building in Geneva, for which it had originally been commissioned, has been extensively covered elsewhere. That’s how I met Harry Clarke’s astonishing The Geneva Window. Some years ago in Miami, a sudden rainstorm accompanied by an argument caused me to look for shelter in a museum.