Nicola Gordon Bowe discusses Harry Clarke’s exquisitely detailed interpretation of Synge’s Queens, an ode to history’s most memorable female characters
Nearly ten years ago, a small leather travelling case was presented to Christie’s for inclusion in its 1997 annual Irish Sale in London . Tailor-made, it contained nine small stained glass panels that had not been seen in public since 1928, when they left Ireland for good. Always in private hands, two of the panels had been reproduced once, in an English art periodical after they had been installed in ‘a library window at ‘Marino’, Ballybrack, the residence of the Rt. Hon. L.A. Waldron in Co. Dublin. But they had not been seen again until 1986, when the Dolmen Press dedicated an unpublished, limited edition monograph to them,and in 1989, when they were featured in the critical biography of their maker, Harry Clarke
