William Orpen

Biography

Orpen made his first large picture as a student: “The Play Scene from Hamlet”, about two metres wide. In 1899 it won him the Slade composition prize. The picture gathers up all his student enthusiasms, and its stylistic borrowings are easy to see.

William Newenham Montague Orpen was born on 27 November 1878 in Stillorgan, near Dublin, into a Protestant family, the fourth and youngest son of the solicitor Arthur Herbert Orpen. Both parents painted as amateurs, and his eldest brother, Richard, became a well-known architect. Six weeks before his thirteenth birthday the boy was admitted to the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, where in six years he won every major prize, as well as the British Isles gold medal for life drawing. From 1897 to 1899 Orpen studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London under Henry Tonks, Philip Wilson Steer and Frederick Brown, with Augustus John as a fellow student. All three teachers belonged to the New English Art Club, and through them Orpen exhibited there in 1899 and became a member in 1900. In his early pictures he liked playing with reflections: “The Mirror” (1900) refers to Jan van Eyck's “Arnolfini Portrait” and to dark seventeenth-century Dutch interiors. He went on to repeat the convex mirror from the van Eyck painting in other works.

In 1901 his first solo exhibition was held at the Carfax Gallery in London.

From 1903 to 1907 Orpen ran a private teaching studio in Chelsea with John. Between 1902 and 1915 he divided his time between London and Dublin and taught at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art; his pupils included Seán Keating, Grace Gifford and Patrick Tuohy. The collector Hugh Lane, a figure of the Celtic Revival (the movement for a new Irish literature and art), collected Impressionist works on Orpen's advice and commissioned from him a series of portraits of Irish contemporaries for the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin. From 1908 to 1912 Orpen spent the summers at Howth, on the coast north of Dublin, and there began painting out of doors, building figures from touches of colour without an outline: “Midday on the Beach” (1910) was painted this way. It was the advice of John Singer Sargent that made him a portraitist. “Mrs St George” (1912) and “Lady Rocksavage” (1913) show the grand portrait that Edwardian society valued, and the group portraits “The Café Royal in London” (1912) and “Homage to Manet” (1909) were no less successful. By the start of the war Orpen was regarded as the most famous and commercially successful artist in Britain.

He refused to go to Ireland, as some Irish people living in England did to avoid conscription, and chose to work for the British Army. In December 1915 he was commissioned in the Army Service Corps. Through acquaintances on the staff of Sir Douglas Haig, the commander of the British forces in France, he secured an appointment as an official war artist in France, which the Daily Mirror reported in January 1917. The other artists on the scheme remained at the rank of second lieutenant and could visit the front for three weeks; Orpen was made a major and allowed to stay indefinitely. In April 1917 he went to the Somme and settled in Amiens. He drew British soldiers, German prisoners and devastated landscapes, but showed his work neither to the censor nor to the Department of Information. In May he painted portraits of Haig and of Hugh Trenchard, commander of the Royal Flying Corps, and both were widely reproduced in newspapers. Returning to the Somme in August, he found the battlefield overgrown with poppies and daisies, and described it in his 1921 memoir: clouds of white butterflies over ground that had been mud, and, in place of fairies, thousands of crosses. He gave up half-tones and moved to pale mauves and bright greens, with large white areas for the chalky soil. In “Dead Germans in a Trench” the blue-green of the bodies indicates decay.

In October 1917 he stayed with No. 56 Squadron near Cassel and painted pilots. Arthur Rhys-Davids was killed in action a week after sitting for him.

His portrait appeared on the cover of the magazine War Pictorial. In early 1918 Orpen sent the military censor two portraits of a young Frenchwoman he knew, under the title “A Spy”. The censor, Arthur Lee, threatened a court-martial, and the pictures were retitled “The Refugee”. Orpen and Lee later became friends and corresponded until the artist's death. In May 1918 125 of his war works were shown at Agnew's gallery in London: in four weeks nine thousand people bought tickets. The exhibition then travelled to Manchester and to the United States. Orpen gave all the works to the government on condition that they stay in their white frames and be kept together; today they are in the Imperial War Museum. In the summer of 1918 he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

From January 1919 Orpen worked in Paris, commissioned by the museum, on group portraits of the delegates to the peace conference: this work produced “A Peace Conference at the Quai d'Orsay” and “The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors”. He conceived the third picture as the delegates entering the Hall of Mirrors, with Haig and Marshal Foch at the centre and the figure of Rhys-Davids among them. Nine months later he painted out all the figures and painted a coffin under a Union Jack, with two ragged soldiers and cherubs. The canvas, “To the Unknown British Soldier in France”, was shown at the Royal Academy in 1923. The public voted it picture of the year, but many critics accused the artist of bad taste and sacrilege. The museum did not accept it, because it was not the group portrait it had commissioned; in 1928, when Orpen painted out the soldiers, the museum took it.

From 1919 he was an associate of the Royal Academy, and from 1921 a full member; his diploma work was “Le Chef de l'Hôtel Chatham, Paris”. In the 1920s he again painted commissioned portraits and kept studios in London and Paris, and among his sitters were David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill and Woodrow Wilson. In all he made more than six hundred portraits. In 1928 he stood for president of the Royal Academy and lost to Sir William Llewellyn.

Orpen died in London on 29 September 1931, aged fifty-two, and was buried at Putney Vale Cemetery. For several decades his works were barely exhibited; the position began to change in the 1980s.