Articles & Texticles

This is my fourth and last post about William Orpen. It shows some of his more famous pictures and some less well known works from many periods in his artistic career.

If you want to go back to the original series of posts, you can find Part 1, dealing with Orpen’s self portraits here, Part 2 called “Orpen and his women” here, and Part 3, covering his work as a war artist here.

I’ve been unable to find many of Orpen’s important works on the web. I know where they are hung, but for some reason many museums are unwilling, through lack of funds or imagination, to show his pictures online.
It can be frustrating to research a subject who was once the most successful artist of his generation, and now be unable to find more than 200 of his pictures online, just 75 years after his death. Many of the images I did find were either of really poor quality or niggardly small.

So here’s the best of the rest, in no particular order. (Click on the thumbnails to enlarge.)

A Mere Fracture 1901

The doctor in this picture was modelled by William Crampton Gore, (1877 - 1946), a fellow student from the Slade School of Art. Orpen and Gore shared lodgings together at 21 Fitzroy Street.
(Gore originally studied medicine and practised as a doctor Dublin until 1901 when he gave it all up for painting.)
Gore went on to become an established painter in his own right and produced the picture below in 1929:

The artist’s daughter playing the piano
William Crampton Gore, RHA

Anita

Anita Bartle was a journalist and author in Dublin. At the time he painted this portrait, Orpen had just returned from a visit to the Prado in Madrid, and he wanted to try a modern version of Rubens’ direct technique, so he used this portrait of his friend as an exercise.
Here he used only red, black and white, and left his brushstrokes visible in the manner of an oil sketch. He gave the portrait to the sitter as a wedding present.

Le Chef de l’Hotel Chatham 1921

This portrait of The chef of l’Hotel Chatham, shown at the Royal Academy in 1921, confirmed Orpen as the leading portraitist of his day. It was said that he had a queue of Rolls-Royces outside his studio whose owners were having their portraits painted within. He was even offered $5,000,000 to come to New York and do a series of 300 portraits. Orpen turned it down, he was painting all the portraits he could handle for $10,000 a time.

Orpen was earning the equivalent of £750,000 a year at this time.

Ken Howard R.A., who now owns and paints in Orpen’s old studio, says:

He was the most sought-after portrait painter of the Edwardian period and rightly so. He obviously got damn good likenesses.

In his heyday, he would have a sitter at each end of the studio. He would work on one portrait at one end of the studio and, while his assistant cleaned his palette, he would go to the other side of the room and continue work on the other portrait.

It was a production line but the work didn’t suffer for it – in fact, it gained from it because he was so in tune, in practice. Nobody can paint portraits like that now.

The Cafe Royal

As usual, Orpen includes himself in the painting. He is seated at left, wearing a bowler hat.

Herbert Everett 1900

The marine and landscape painter John Everett, who sat for his portrait, showing the influence of both Whistler and John Singer Sargent, against a background of his own watercolours and drawings of ships.

Everett was a student at the Slade School of Art with Orpen and at one point they shared a studio.
(I’ll do a post about Everett soon, as he was a most original marine painter; unusual in a field so tied to traditions.)

A Bloomsbury Family 1907

This group portrait shows the artist William Nicholson and his family. Nicholson’s wife, the painter Mabel Pryde, is standing by the door. Sitting at the table from left to right are the Nicholson children: Nancy, who married the writer Robert Graves; Tony, who died during the war in 1918; and Ben, who would become Britain’s foremost abstract artist. Standing in the foreground is Christopher or ‘Kit’. He became an architect. Orpen himself is reflected in the convex mirror.

Here’s a painting by Nicholson:

The Girl With The Tattered Glove by William Nicholson

Augustus John 1900

Orpen and Augustus John met at the Slade and became firm friends and travelling and drinking companions.
John jokingly criticised this portrait many years later for not conveying ‘the shy, dreamy and reticent character of its model’. It’s one of Orpen’s finest early portraits, and shows a young artist whose behaviour was often far from ‘reticent’.

In fact, Augustus John underwent a personailty change in 1897 as a result of injuring his head while swimming. His methodical way of working was affected, and his style became much freer and looser, and he became quite a bit wilder.

Self Portrait

Orpen is standing in front of one of his own paintings, shown below in a different version: “Sowing New Seed” painted in 1913

New Seed

When this picture was bought by the Art Gallery of South Australia, in Adelaide, it was decried in a public letter writing campaign and eventually defaced (The figure on the left was damaged in the pubic region).
Orpen swapped the painting for a copy of the portrait he had painted of Marechal Foch, (Link) and New Seeds went back to London.

Its full title was “Sowing New Seed for the Board of Agriculture and Technical Instruction for Ireland”. It was an allegorical, even political observation about the state of the arts in Ireland at the time.

The Window Seat 1901

Painted on the Orpens’ honeymoon, in Lisheens House, Pearsons Bridge, Near Bantry, Co. Cork. The house had belonged to William Orpen’s father, Arthur Herbert Orpen, and the window was in the north-east-facing front of the house. This would indicate that it was the morning sun Orpen used to illuminate his wife, Grace Knewstub.

Lady Orpen and Child

Two Unhappy Clients

David Beatty, 1st Earl Beatty C 1919

In 1910 David Beatty became the youngest admiral since Nelson, and was made c-in-c of the Grand Fleet during the closing years of the First World War. He felt that the Armistice and the collapse of Germany robbed him of the ‘glorious achievement’ he had expected - the destruction of the German High Sea Fleet.

Both Beatty and his wife thought the portrait was a bad likeness. Beatty even offered to sit again for William Orpen to correct the painting, but this idea was firmly resisted. Orpen himself, however, admitted to being a little colour blind - he saw red as pink and tried to correct this in his pictures, but was still criticised for making his sitters look too ruddy.

So, Beatty was grumpy on 2 fronts. First, he misses out on an orgy of unprecedentd naval destruction, and second, he looks a bit too pink in his portrait. Next, please!

H.R.H. The Prince of Wales 1927

Orpen was invited by the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews in Scotland to paint a portrait of their patron, The Prince of Wales.

To quote from the Royal & Ancient Golf Club website:

Orpen agreed that his fee for the portrait would be ‘whatever sum was raised amongst the members, but that he hoped it would be in the neighbourhood of £1,000.’ The club sought to raise £1,000 through members’ subscriptions. Appeals for funds were made in 1924 and 1925, by which time the portrait, commissioned in 1922, was still not complete.

In November 1925, correspondence between the club, the artist and the Prince of Wales’ secretary, suggests that the portrait was delayed because of the difficulty in arranging meetings with the Prince. The artist had also struggled to arrange a sitting where the Prince could pose for a photographer. In addition, the Prince suffered the loss of his grandmother, Princess Alexandra, in 1925. The completion of the portrait was to be delayed for yet another reason.

In 1927, Sir William Orpen wrote to the Club to inform them that he was dissatisfied with the portrait. The artist offered either to refund £500, half of the commission fee, or be given the opportunity to modify the painting until he was satisfied with it.

Orpen was asked to continue working on the portrait and by September 1927, it was complete. The portrait shows the Prince of Wales dressed in fashionable golfing attire. Although the club had requested that the Prince pose in the traditional Captain’s red coat, his preference was to be shown wearing a knitted sweater and plus-fours.

Apparently, the Prince greeted the portrait with the comment that ‘It’s a very nice picture of a pair of shoes‘. Today, the portrait hangs in the Big Room of the Clubhouse.

(My emphasis)

Family holidays

Kit 1913

Christine, affectionately known as Kit, was the middle daughter of William and Grace, and turned seven in September 1913. She remembered the seaside holidays with special affection and enjoyed co-operating as model for her father:

He paid half a crown an hour for sitting for those portraits - a fortune in those days. “To keep me still he placed me on a drawing board on top of a sculptor’s high stool. As the board overlapped the stool considerably on all sides one was bound to sit absolutely still or have a nasty crash. Only an hour at a time and then a dash along the cliffs for a bathe - golden days.”

The Yacht Race

Compare the child’s pose in the above picture with this:

The Edge Of The Cliff, Howth

On The Beach, Howth

The Model 1911

Look closely at the picture on the wall behind the sofa in the above picture and you will see this:

Nude Study 1911

And yet the painter shown is (unusually) not Orpen.

Early Death

Sir William Newenham Montague Orpen

This photo shows Orpen holding one of the 70 cigarettes he smoked a day, which, when combined with the large amount of alcohol he was drinking and the syphylis he reputedly suffered from, caused him to retire to a nursing home in the summer of 1931, and die in early October that same year, aged only 53.

There’s so much left to unearth about William Orpen. A catalogue Raisonne is in the works, but I have no idea as to its publication date.

I leave you with a link to Time Magazine’s obituary of Orpen, a fascinating piece of contemporary reporting, here.
(I’ll also tuck it in under the fold in case it disappears off the web.)

“A painting well drawn is always well enough painted.” - William Orpen

Billy Orps

Posted Monday, Oct. 12, 1931

After long illness, Death came to Sir William Oroen last week. Britain and the world lost a great painter.

Sir William Orpen, K. B. E., R. A. was born in Stillorgan, County Dublin, 52 years ago. He was an incredible little man who looked like a Gaelic gnome, used to smoke 70 cigarets a day, eat four meals, sleep twelve hours and walk 15 miles. To an enormous circle of acquaintances he was known quite simply as Billy Orps.

His career started in 1890 when he won a L2Q scholarship at the age of 12 and began to study painting at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. He went to London and studied at the Slade School when that dusty institute contained such promising pupils as Augustus John, Sir John Lavery, William Rothenstein.

Billy Orps did not have to wait long for recognition. His humor, the firmness of his line, above all his brilliant use of color attracted inter national attention. Very soon he had more portrait com missions than he could handle. Tycoons besieged his studio. One New York gallery offered him $5,000,000 to come to New York and do a series of 300 portraits. Billy Orps turned it down. He had all the portraits he could possibly do right in London at $10,000 apiece.

Otto Hermann Kahn, Andrew William Mellon, William Wallace Atterbury are among the U. S. businessmen who traveled to London to be limned by the little Irishman.

During the War, British authorities pinned the gold crowns of a major on his shoulders, clapped a tin helmet on his head and sent him to the front to do sketches of the troops and large oil portraits of the generals. It was this series of War pictures that won him his knighthood in 1918.

But beside the successful portrait painter there was another Billy Orpen. His soul revolted frequently at painting the smug faces of Success. He never lost his fondness for Gypsies and the color of the West of Ireland. He made brilliant little landscapes. He would sneak away from his job at the Versailles Peace Conference to paint the honey-bearded chef of the Hotel Chatham in Paris.

He told President Wilson, General Pershing, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson what he thought of them and earned the subsidiary nickname of “The Wasp.”

When he could not stand the idea of drawing another frock coat, he would paint himself again, accenting his pixie face, dressing himself in outlandish costumes. There exist striking self-portraits of Billy Orps in a succession of funny hats, in racing silks as a jockey, as a major in his muffler and trench helmet, as a wildfowler, as a painter with a dustcloth wrapped round his head, in his bathrobe.

Though he was never slovenly in his drawing he was artist enough to let his style change with the changes in modern life.

In May he sent to the Royal Academy a highly formalized picture of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. The British press received it with the angry snorts generally reserved for the opera of Sculptor Jacob Epstein. Apparently it meant a great deal to Billy Orps.

His health broke down, he spent most of the summer in a nursing home. Recently he was discharged and attempted to get on with his painting. Last week came the final relapse.

From the Oct. 12, 1931 issue of TIME magazine