Major Sir William Newenham Montague Orpen (27 November 1878 – 29 September 1931) was an Irish artist who mainly worked in London. Orpen was a fine draughtsman and a popular, commercially successful painter of portraits for the well-to-do in Edwardian society, though many of his most striking paintings are self-portraits.

During World War I, he was the most prolific of the official war artists sent by Britain to the Western Front. There he produced drawings and paintings of ordinary soldiers, dead men, and German prisoners of war, as well as portraits of generals and politicians. Most of these works, 138 in all, he donated to the British government; they are now in the collection of the Imperial War Museum. His connections to the senior ranks of the British Army allowed him to stay in France longer than any of the other official war artists, and although he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1918 Birthday Honours, and also elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts, his determination to serve as a war artist cost him both his health and his social standing in Britain.

After his early death a number of critics, including other artists, were loudly dismissive of Orpen's work, and for many years his paintings were rarely exhibited, a situation that only began to change in the 1980s.

Biography

Early life

thumb|The Mirror (1900) ([[Tate)]]

Born in Stillorgan, County Dublin, William Orpen was the fourth and youngest son of Arthur Herbert Orpen (1830–1926), a solicitor, and his wife, Anne Caulfield (1834–1912), the eldest daughter of the Right Rev. Charles Caulfield (1804–1862), the Bishop of Nassau. Both his parents were amateur painters, and his eldest brother, Richard Caulfield Orpen, became a notable architect. His nieces were Bea Orpen and Kathleen Delap. The historian Goddard Henry Orpen was his second cousin. The family lived at 'Oriel', a large house with extensive grounds containing stables and a tennis court. Orpen and Knewstub had three daughters together, but the marriage was not a happy one; by 1908, Orpen had begun a long-running affair with Mrs Evelyn Saint-George, a well-connected American millionairess based in London, with whom he also had a child.

Early career

thumb|Grace reading at Howth Bay (c.1908-1912)

After he left the Slade, from 1903 to 1907, Orpen ran a private teaching studio, the Chelsea Art School, at Rossetti Mansions near the King's Road with his fellow Slade graduate Augustus John. Between 1902 and 1915, Orpen divided his time between London and Dublin. He taught at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, and his teaching influenced a generation of young Irish artists. His pupils included Seán Keating, Grace Gifford, Patrick Tuohy, Leo Whelan and Margaret Clarke. This was the period of the Celtic revival in Ireland and, responding to the growth of new literary and other cultural developments, Orpen painted three large allegorical paintings: Sowing New Seed, The Western Wedding and The Holy Well. A key figure in the Celtic Revival was Hugh Lane, who was a friend and mentor to Orpen, and who begin collecting impressionist art works with Orpen's guidance. In the summer of 1904 Orpen and Lane visited Paris and Madrid together, and some years later Lane commissioned a series of portraits of contemporary Irish figures from Orpen for the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin.

Between 1911 and 1913, in London, Orpen painted a series of portraits, mostly three-quarter-length, of Vera Brewster, the wife of the writer Joe Horne. These included the paintings The Roscommon Dragoon, The Irish Volunteer and The Angler. John Singer Sargent promoted Orpen's work and he soon built a lucrative reputation, in both London and Dublin, for painting society portraits. Mrs St. George, (1912), and Lady Rocksavage (1913), both demonstrate Orpen's ability to produce the swagger portraits that Edwardian high society greatly valued. Group portraits of a type known as conversation pieces were also hugely popular and Orpen painted several, most notably The Cafe Royal in London (1912), and Homage to Manet (1909), which showed Walter Sickert and several other artists and critics seated in front of Édouard Manet's Portrait of Eva Gonzalies. Orpen had worked on Homage to Manet since 1906 at his studio in South Bolton Gardens in Chelsea, where Lane also had rooms. but soon started using both his own contacts and those of Evelyn Saint-George, to secure a war artist posting. Orpen knew both Philip Sassoon, the private secretary to Sir Douglas Haig, and also Sir John Cowans, then serving as Quartermaster-General to the Forces. In January 1917, the Daily Mirror reported that Haig himself had "conferred" on Orpen the title of an official artist with the British Army in France. The Department of Information, who were actually running the British war artist scheme, were given little choice but to accept the situation. While the other artists on the Department scheme remained at the honorary rank of second lieutenant and were restricted to three weeks visiting the Western Front, Orpen was promoted to Major and given indefinite permission to remain at the Front. An officer from Kensington Barracks was appointed as his military aide, a car and driver were made available in France and Orpen paid for a batman and assistant to accompany him.

The Somme battlefield

thumb|The Schwaben Redoubt (1917)

Orpen returned to the Somme in August 1917 and found the landscape transformed. Writing in 1921, he described the scene:<blockquote>I had left it mud, nothing but water, shell-holes and mud – the most gloomy dreary abomination of desolation the mind could imagine; and now, in the summer of 1917, no words could express the beauty of it. The dreary, dismal mud was baked white and pure – dazzling white. White daisies, red poppies and a blue flower, great masses of them, stretched for miles and miles. The sky a pure dark blue, and the whole air, up to a height of about forty feet, thick with white butterflies: your clothes were covered with butterflies. It was like an enchanted land: but in the place of fairies there were thousands of little white crosses, marked 'Unknown British Soldier', for the most part.

Others regard the two figures as purely allegorical representations of sacrifice and suffering. In particular, the soldier in Blown Up, Mad has been likened to early Renaissance depictions of the risen Christ emerging from the tomb. Orpen gave Lee a fantastical story that the woman in the picture was a German spy who had been executed by the French but who, in an attempt to save herself, had at the last moment revealed herself naked in front of the firing squad. Lee had Orpen recalled to London to be reprimanded at the War Office. There, Orpen retracted the firing squad story but was ordered to remain in London. Orpen ignored this and, quite illegally, made his way back to France. There he contrived to receive a phone call from Haig's private office, within earshot of several of Lee's colleagues from Army Intelligence, inviting him to dinner with Haig to discuss what he would like to paint next. Lee dropped his objections to Orpen working in France, and Orpen agreed to rename the two pictures The Refugee.

As the war progressed, Orpen and Lee became good friends; Orpen painted two portraits of him, and they went drinking together in London and maintained a lively correspondence until Orpen's death. It is not clear how well known this friendship was during their lives but if it was known of in Dublin it would have caused consternation and real pain in several quarters. Not only had Lee been the brigade major sent to Dublin to put down the 1916 Easter Rising, but had been the officer in charge of arranging several of the executions that followed the fighting, including that of Joseph Plunkett, the husband of Grace Gifford, Orpen's star pupil from his teaching days. In fact, between joining the British army in 1915 and his death in 1931, Orpen spent only a single day, in 1918, in Ireland.

Recognition

thumb|Zonnebeke (1918) (Tate)

In May 1918, 125 of Orpen's war paintings and drawings were displayed at Agnew's Gallery in Old Bond Street in London. The exhibition was a great success with 9000 paying visitors in its four weeks. Highlights of the exhibition included nine of Orpen's 'khaki portraits' and several of his works from the Somme such as Highlander Passing a Grave and Thinker on the Butte de Warlencourt. There was much press discussion as to why the censor had passed Orpen's Dead Germans in a Trench as suitable for display, after his refusal to allow Christopher Nevinson's Paths of Glory to be displayed two months previously. In fact, Lee had refused to pass nearly all of the paintings shown at Agnew's but Orpen appealed to the Director of Military Intelligence, General George Macdonogh, and had him overruled. After Agnew's, several museums and galleries wanted to host the exhibition and it was taken to the Manchester City Art Gallery and then the United States. Whilst the exhibition was in London, it was announced that Orpen was donating all the works on display to the British government on the understanding that they should remain in their white frames and be kept together as a single body of work. They are now in the collection of the Imperial War Museum in London. In the King's 1918 Birthday Honours list that summer he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Orpen made it clear he wished to remain in France and was keen to work in the newly liberated towns. By the end of the summer of 1918, Orpen was mentally exhausted and his works became increasingly theatrical, less realistic and more allegorical. In Harvest (1918), which shows women tending a grave covered in barbed wire, he used a garish palette of colours to emphasize the unreal nature of the scene. While Bombing: Night and Adam and Eve at Peronne seem somewhat flawed compositions, other paintings were far more successful. Most notably, The Mad Woman of Douai is a harrowing depiction of the aftermath of a rape. When Orpen met the woman some time afterwards she was 'silent and motionless, except for one thumb which constantly twitched'.

As the war entered its final stages Orpen witnessed scenes which he found increasingly macabre. One day, even the broad-minded Orpen was shocked to encounter three young French prostitutes offering their services next to a burial party at a gravesite. Towards the end of the war, he painted a handful of 'parable paintings', such as Armistice Night, Amiens and The Official Entry of the Kaiser, that used black humour to re-imagine the coming victory. Most of these paintings were never displayed in public after the war.

thumb|300x300px| [[To the Unknown British Soldier in France (1921)]]

Orpen considered that the whole conference was being conducted with a lack of respect or regard for the suffering of the soldiers who fought in the war, and he attempted to address this in the third painting of the commission. This picture was to show the delegates and military leaders as they entered the Hall of Mirrors to sign the Treaty of Versailles. Orpen sent Evelyn Saint-George a letter detailing the original layout and composition of the work. Haig and Marshal Foch were at the centre with the other delegates on either side of them. Among the delegates, Orpen included two additional figures, a Grenadier Guards sergeant and Arthur Rhys-Davids, the young fighter pilot he had painted the week before he was killed in 1917. After working on this composition for nine months, Orpen painted over all the figures and replaced them with a coffin covered by the Union Jack and flanked by a pair of ghostly and wretched soldiers clothed in rags, actually the figure from the painting Blown Up, Mad, with two cherubs above them supporting garlands of flowers. This painting, now known as To the Unknown British Soldier in France, was first exhibited in 1923 at the Royal Academy. The public voted it picture of the year, but almost all of the critics who reviewed the picture condemned it; and, from a handful of critics and newspapers, Orpen received sustained abuse and was accused of bad taste, technical ineptitude and, for the two figures either side of the coffin, sacrilege. Orpen did receive some letters of appreciation from ex-servicemen and from family members of soldiers who had died in the war, but he still felt the need to issue a statement explaining the picture and his intentions. However, it was clearly not the group portrait the Imperial War Museum had commissioned, and the Museum refused to accept it. The picture remained in Orpen's studio until 1928 when, on his own initiative, he offered to paint out the cherubs and the soldiers if that would make it acceptable to the Museum. The then Director of the IWM replied that he would be happy to accept the picture as it was, or however Orpen wished to present it. Orpen painted out the soldiers and the painting was accepted by the Museum in 1928.

Later life

After the war, Orpen returned to painting society portraits and enjoyed great commercial success. He was never short of portrait commissions to work on and throughout the 1920s often earned £35,000 per year and could easily charge 2,000 guineas for a picture. In 1928 Orpen stood for election as President of the Royal Academy but lost to Sir William Llewellyn. His work was also part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1928 Summer Olympics.

Death

Orpen became seriously ill in May 1931, and died aged 52 in London, on 29 September 1931, and was buried at Putney Vale Cemetery.

Orpen's 1910 self-portrait Leading the Life in the West has been read as a reference to the 1907 play The Playboy of the Western World, by John Millington Synge, whom Orpen knew and greatly liked. and the Royal Academy also held a memorial exhibition in 1933, part of which travelled to the Birmingham City Art Gallery. This had a huge influence, and for many years Orpen was largely forgotten. Other than the collection of his war paintings in the 'Orpen Gallery' of the Imperial War Museum, only two of Orpen's works were regularly on display in Britain, The Mirror in the Tate and A Woman in Leeds City Art Gallery. A major retrospective of his work was held at the National Gallery of Ireland in 1978 but was not shown in Britain.</blockquote>

Memberships

thumb|right|200px|Plaque at 8 South Bolton Gardens, South Kensington, London

Orpen was a member or affiliated with the following organisations:

  • 1900: Member, New English Art Club
  • 1904: Elected associate of Royal Hibernian Academy
  • 1908: Elected member of Royal Hibernian Academy
  • 1908: Member, National Portrait Society
  • 1919: Elected associate of the Royal Academy
  • 1921: Elected member of the Royal Academy
  • 1921: President, International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers

Bibliography

  • An Onlooker in France, 1917–1919 (1921)
  • Stories of Old Ireland and Myself (1924)
  • The Outline of Art (1924)

See also

  • List of paintings by William Orpen

References

Further reading

  • Bunbury, Turtle, The Glorious Madness, Tales of The Irish and The Great War, <br>Sir William Orpen, pp.&nbsp;116–21, Gill & Macmillan, Dublin 12 (2014)
  • Angeria Rigamonti di Cuto', 'Staging the modernist self: the self-portraits of William Orpen', Visual Culture in Britain, volume 13, issue 3, 2012
  • : works by William Orpen in public British collections
  • William Orpen at Imperial War Museum Collection Search.