If you’re looking for a different way to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, you could drop by St. Vincent de Paul Church on Avenue C in Bayonne and drink in the stained glass artwork of Harry Clarke. Acknowledged as one of the great artists in stained glass in the 20th century, Clarke designed 40 windows for the church, including one of St. Patrick. The first was installed in December 1929. Clarke, who was diagnosed with tuberculosis, went to Switzerland to try to recuperate. He died en route back to Ireland in January 1931. The remaining windows for Bayonne were installed by his studio under the supervision of his wife Margaret, an artist in her own right.

Clarke was born on St. Patrick’s Day 1889 in Dublin, where his father was also a stained glass artist. The son went on to study in England and France. His oeuvre includes more than 160 windows, with both religious and secular themes. They can be found in buildings in Ireland, Northern Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales and Australia.

The most scandalous (for the times), “The Geneva Window,” is in the permanent collection of the Wolfsonian-Florida International University in Miami, Florida. An Irish government department commissioned the window for the League of Nations in Geneva but balked when the artists’s proposal for a series of panels based on Irish literature included an image of Nelly, a semi-nude dancer being leered at by Mr. Gilhooley, based on a Liam O’Flaherty novel. “The Geneva Window” is now considered among Clarke’s masterpieces.

Art critic Aidan Dunne wrote in The Irish Times, “Following Clarke’s death, his good friend Lennox Robinson wrote that ‘Ireland has lost her greatest designer in stained-glass, and her greatest black-and-white artist,’ and he remarked on the intensity with which Clarke had thrown himself into his work. Clarke’s exceptional talent was never questioned, and the outstanding quality of his work, in both stained-glass and illustration, has always been recognised — the brilliance of his work was in full view in churches throughout the country — but he was for a long time underestimated nonetheless.”