LITMIR.BIZ

      FIGURE 1.2

      ‘Think!’ (1914) by Harry Lawrence Oakley. Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, Great Britain. © Imperial War Museum Q33144.

      The general historical trend of the past few decades has been to see Ireland’s Memorial Records as a static list of military information, focusing particularly on the 49,435 names printed in the eight volumes. They have been compared to the official publications by His Majesty’s Stationary Office, Soldiers Died in the Great War (1921) and Officers Died in the Great War (1919) – and they have been found wanting in their level of comprehensiveness and detail. Clarke’s illustrations are almost incidental in the case of debates over the textual content.

If we step back, however, we can see that even the list of names is mobile: it has been challenged, authenticated, studied, and changed. Historians, journalists, and citizens have uncovered hundreds of names of Irish servicemen in the war.16 The centennial’s focus on ordinary citizens, the contributions by the Irish citizenry to the war effort, the peace movement, and the discourse surrounding the war demonstrate that a bound list of 49,435 names represents only a fraction of those whose lives were lost as a result of the war. The list might include munitions workers, veterinarians, and those who died of physical wounds long after the Armistice. In other words, it’s important to recognize that Ireland’s Memorial Records have informed and developed dialogue for decades. Any Irish historian working with the First World War has had some engagement at some level with Ireland’s Memorial Records.

      This book is designed to tell the story of how and why Ireland’s Memorial Records were published, how they were conceived from the beginning as part of a physical national memorial, and how Harry Clarke infused the decorative borders with his own distinctive vision. While Ireland’s Memorial Records have been listed as part of Clarke’s oeuvre, they have not been extensively studied in terms of their art and their history. The history of Ireland’s Memorial Records offers a glimpse into the life of Dublin during the wars. The cast of characters is sweeping, including, in addition to Clarke himself, Andrew Jameson, William Orpen, Edwin Lutyens, Seán Keating, Joseph Maunsell Hone, George Roberts, and Sir John French, all of whom, in one way or another, affected the outcome of the books or the disposition of the Irish National War Memorial Gardens. What emerges is a fascinating story of how Dublin’s unionist and nationalist leaders worked together to create a unique memorial record of the Irish dead from the First World War, the same unionism and nationalism that ultimately divided Ireland and fostered competing narratives about the First World War.

      The centenary of the First World War has provided the opportunity to tell new stories, stories other than military engagements or lines of command. War affects civilians and soldiers alike, noncombatants as well as combatants. Continued newspaper coverage of those serving on front lines, houses draped in black crepe, soldiers in uniform in the city, the activity at training camps, recruiting posters, the requisition of horses and mules, food and paper shortages, and the changing face of labour influenced the perceptions of old and young, women and men. The outpouring of art from the war is one consequence of the heightened awareness of wartime conditions.

Much has been written about British art of the First World War, particularly about the official war artists who where employed through the War Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House in London to record their impressions of the front lines.17 These artists included well-known names, such as William Orpen, Christopher Wynne Nevinson, Paul Nash, Eric Kennington, and Muirhead Bone. Their works were featured in exhibitions in London and published in a full-colour series titled British Artists at the Front. The paintings of Nevinson, Nash, Kennington, and Orpen eventually came to record their profound disillusion with the horrors of the war, in keeping with the works of the poets published after 1916. Among their public statements and private sentiments, Nash’s comment stands out: ‘I am no longer an artist. I am an artist who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls.’18

Orpen, born in Dublin, an instructor at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, and Harry Clarke’s teacher, became an official war artist for the War Propaganda Bureau in 1917. The Irish painter

Скачать книгу