Sign up to The Irish Times Archive (1859 - 2008)My Account »

William Butler Yeats assisted Harry Clarke in choosing Irish writers from which to inspire one of his finest works, the Geneva Window, only for it to be ‘disgracefully’ rejected, writes AIDAN DUNNE

Clarke is generally acknowledged as the country’s leading Symbolist artist, and as probably the finest Irish stained-glass artist ever. And there-in lies a problem, as many commentators have pointed out. For the most part stained glass is a site-specific, light-dependent medium. Rather than being held in museums, his works are widely dispersed, installed where they were designed for, or even further afield, seen at their best only at certain times and atmospheric conditions.