100 artworks: your favourite work so far

The winner of our summer competition, in which readers were asked to write about their favourite artwork in our series so far, is Elaine Kelly Conroy. She receives a copy of the Royal Irish Academy's five-volume 'Art and Architecture of Ireland'. Here's a short version of her article, about Harry Clarke's Eve of St Agnes window.

Designed for the Biscuit King, nestled in the return on the stairs of Harold Jacob’s Ailesbury Road home, facing the bedrooms, the Eve of St Agnes blessed sleepers with sweet dreams and thoughts erotic en route to the Land of Nod.

The window is surprisingly small considering the detail it embraces, but its bejewelled colours amplify its presence. Although the two lights are each sectioned into a lunette and 10 panels, the window presents as one stunningly luminous delight. As the viewer is drawn in a story unfolds, bringing John Keats’s poem ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ to life in ways the poet could not have imagined.

Clarke’s genius, which dipped so fluently into the subconscious and drew back long-fingered creatures from a fairy world, has been given full reign. His distinctive superimposing of different colours of glass, and disguising of the lead lines as fronds of seaweed, helped to push the boundaries of what stained glass could achieve. Harry Clarke is an Irishman to be celebrated