William Orpen was an Irish artist who mainly worked in London. He produced a vast amount of work, as both a portrait painter and a war artist, with this collection of images featuring some of his work from World War I.
This download features 61 hi-res images, in jpeg format, by the Irish artist, William Orpen.
The images are all 600dpi and range in size from 3010 pixels wide/tall to 6610 pixels wide/tall.
Click on the link above to see a full list of the images included.
Sir William Newenham Montague Orpen (1878-1931) 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, several 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.
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). Both his parents were amateur painters, and his eldest brother, Richard Caulfield Orpen, became a notable architect. The family lived at 'Oriel', a large house with extensive grounds containing stables and a tennis court. Orpen appears to have had a happy childhood there.
Orpen was a naturally talented painter, and six weeks before his thirteenth birthday was enrolled at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. During his six years at the college, he won every major prize there, plus the British Isles gold medal for life drawing, before leaving to study at the Slade School of Art between 1897 and 1899. At the Slade he mastered oil painting and began to experiment with different painting techniques and effects. Orpen would include mirrors in his pictures to create images within images, add false frames and collages around his subjects, and often make pictorial references to works by other artists in his own paintings. His two-metre-wide painting The Play Scene from Hamlet won the Slade composition prize in 1899. His teachers at the Slade included Henry Tonks, Philip Wilson Steer and Frederick Brown, all of whom were members of the New English Art Club; they ensured he exhibited there in 1899, and that he became a member in 1900.
Whilst at the Slade, he became engaged to Emily Scobel, a model and the subject of The Mirror. She ended their relationship in 1901, and Orpen married Grace Knewstub, the sister-in-law of Sir William Rothenstein. 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.
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.
A key figure in the Celtic Revival was Hugh Lane, who was a friend and mentor to Orpen, and who begin collecting impressionist artworks 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. From 1908 onwards, Orpen exhibited works in the Royal Academy regularly. Between 1908 and 1912, Orpen and his family spent the summer on the coast at Howth, north of Dublin, where he began painting in the open air and developed a distinctive plein-air style that featured figures composed of touches of colour without a drawn outline. The most notable of these works was Midday on the Beach, shown at the NEAC in 1910.
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 Gonzales. Orpen had worked on Homage to Manet since 1906 at his studio in South Bolton Gardens in Chelsea, where Lane also had rooms. By the start of World War I, Orpen was the most famous and most commercially successful artist working in Britain.
At the start of World War One, a number of Irish people living in England returned to Ireland to avoid conscription. Among them was Orpen's studio assistant and former pupil, Seán Keating. Keating encouraged Orpen to do likewise, but he refused and committed himself to supporting the British war effort.
In April 1917, Orpen travelled to the Somme and based himself in Amiens. Orpen had arrived on the Somme three weeks after the German forces had pulled back to the Hindenburg Line. Each day Orpen would be driven to locations such as Thiepval, Beaumont-Hamel or Ovillers-la-Boisselle to sketch Allied troops or German prisoners and record the devastation left by the Battle of the Somme amid the frozen and desolate landscape. However, he did not submit any work to the Department of Information nor to the military censor. When he was reprimanded for that, he had Haig's office move the officer who had issued the reprimand to other duties. In May 1917, he painted portraits of both Haig and Sir Hugh Trenchard, the commander of the Royal Flying Corps, and both of these images were widely reproduced in British newspapers and magazines. In June Orpen moved to the Ypres Salient and stayed at Cassel in the Hotel Sauvage, where he painted the self-portrait known as Ready to Start.
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 returned to France in July and spent a second summer painting on the old Somme battlefield and making frequent trips to Paris to complete a series of portraits of Canadian commanders. Later he painted the immediate aftermath of the fighting at Zonnebeke that had taken place during the Fifth Battle of Ypres. 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 emphasise 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'. The two soldiers in the picture are both figures borrowed from other paintings of his, as is the grave in the foreground. Orpen had been shocked to see a number of such burial mounds with, as he wrote, "arms and feet showing in lots of cases".
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. In November 1918, Orpen collapsed and became seriously ill. Yvonne Aubicq spent two months nursing him before he moved to Paris in January 1919 to begin work on his next commission.
When the war ended, the Imperial War Museum commissioned Orpen to stay in France and paint three large group portraits of the delegates to Paris Peace Conference. Throughout 1919 he painted individual portraits of the delegates to the Conference and these formed the basis of his two large paintings, A Peace Conference at the Quai d'Orsay and The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors. The third picture, To the Unknown British Soldier in France, was the subject of some controversy.
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. Throughout the 1920s he exhibited at the Royal Academy each year and maintained homes and studios in both London and Paris, where he lived with Aubicq.
Orpen continued to drink heavily and although he was separated from his wife, they never divorced. Eventually, he and Aubicq separated and she later married William Grover-Williams, Orpen's former chauffeur. His 1921 Royal Academy submission was a portrait of the head chef at the Hotel Chatham in Paris. The Tate Gallery were keen to acquire the painting using funds from the Chantrey Bequest. After Orpen assured the Tate that the picture met the conditions required by the Bequest and that he had painted the picture entirely in Britain, the Tate announced the purchase. Several people then came forward to say that they had seen Orpen paint the picture in Paris. Orpen withdrew from the purchase and gave the Tate a portrait of Sir William Symington McCormick instead. Orpen subsequently submitted Le Chef de l'Hotel Chatham, Paris to the Royal Academy as his diploma painting.
Orpen's wartime memoir, An Onlooker in France, 1917-1919, was published in 1921 and all the proceeds donated to war charities. In 1925, Orpen painted Sunlight, a brilliant depiction, in dappled sunlight, of a nude woman on a bed, behind whom hangs The Seine at Marly, the 1874 painting by Monet which Orpen owned. In 1922, Orpen was reported to be receiving treatment in London for 'tobacco poisoning'. In 1923, Lee introduced Orpen to the Prince of Wales, and secured Orpen a commission to paint the Prince for the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews. A long series of disagreements followed between the Prince's advisors, who wanted a formal portrait, and Orpen, who wanted to paint Edward in his golf clothes. Orpen got his way but it was not until 1928 that the R&A put the painting on display. In 1927, Orpen accepted a commission to paint a portrait of David Lloyd George but the completed work was rejected as being too informal for such a senior politician. The painting remained with Orpen and was only purchased by the National Portrait Gallery after his death. 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.
Orpen became seriously ill in May 1931, and died aged 52 in London, on 29 September 1931, and was buried at Putney Vale Cemetery. A stone tablet in the Island of Ireland Peace Park Memorial at Messines, Belgium, commemorates him.
