William Orpen: the Irish painter who walked away from Ireland

In 1923 the Royal Academy's picture of the year was a painting the public voted for and almost every critic hated. It showed a coffin in a marble hall, flanked by two half-naked soldiers in rags. To make it, William Orpen had painted out roughly thirty finished portraits of the generals and statesmen who won the war.

He was the most technically gifted painter Ireland produced in his generation, and he spent most of his career using that gift on the rich. Then he went to France.

A prodigy from Stillorgan

Orpen was born on 27 November 1878 at Stillorgan, Co. Dublin, the fourth and youngest son of a solicitor. He entered the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in 1891 — six weeks before his thirteenth birthday — and stayed six years, taking, by one account, every major prize the school had, plus the British Isles gold medal for life drawing.

He went on to the Slade School in London from 1897 to 1899, taught by Henry Tonks and Philip Wilson Steer, in a year that also held Augustus John, Gwen John, Wyndham Lewis and Ambrose McEvoy. In 1899 he took the Slade composition prize for The Play Scene from Hamlet, a canvas two metres wide.

The Mirror, painted in 1900 and now in Tate, is the picture that announced him. It is a small portrait of Emily Scobel in a shadowed room, with a round mirror on the back wall that quotes Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait directly. A twenty-one-year-old had looked at four hundred years of painting and decided he could join in.

The Dublin years

From 1902 to 1914 Orpen taught part-time at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, crossing from London for terms at a time. He introduced the nude model to the life class and taught, among others, Seán Keating, Margaret Clarke, Patrick Tuohy, Beatrice Elvery and Grace Gifford.

Gifford studied with him between 1904 and 1907, and he painted her as Young Ireland in 1907. Nine years later she married Joseph Plunkett in the chapel of Kilmainham Gaol, hours before his execution.

His Irish subject pictures are not the sentimental things the titles suggest. The Holy Well (1916, tempera, National Gallery of Ireland) looks like a devotional scene and is the opposite of one: figures in various states of undress deferring to a monastic figure at a pattern-day well, while a young man in Aran clothes — Keating, who had brought the garments back from the islands the year before — watches with open scorn. Sowing New Seed, now in an Australian public collection, sets a naked figure scattering ideas across a landscape of tumbledown farm and pig-pen; it was a joke at the expense of the body that was supposed to be modernising Irish culture.

Homage to Manet (1909, Manchester Art Gallery) is the London counterpart: George Moore reading aloud to Steer, Sickert, D. S. MacColl, Hugh Lane and Tonks, beneath Manet's Portrait of Eva Gonzàles — a picture Lane owned, hanging in the house where Orpen had his studio.

France, 1917

Orpen was commissioned into the Army Service Corps in December 1915. In April 1917 the arrangement was made that sent him to France as an official war artist, with the rank of major and, unusually, indefinite permission to stay at the front. Other official artists were second lieutenants allowed three weeks.

His first destination was the Somme, five months after the fighting there ended. He went back that August. What he found in summer he described in his 1921 book An Onlooker in France: “White daisies, red poppies and a blue flower, great masses of them, stretched for miles and miles … the whole air, up to a height of about forty feet, thick with white 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.”

He painted generals and he painted the dead. Dead Germans in a Trench shows two bodies in a plank-lined trench, one face-down in mud, the other on his back with his mouth open, the flesh already turning. A newspaper of the day noted that “Mr Orpen is certainly not a sentimentalist; he seems to paint them with cold, serene skill, just as he might paint a bunch of flowers.” The Mad Woman of Douai puts a traumatised woman in a ruined church while soldiers walk past and peasants stare.

When 125 of these went on show at Agnew's in Bond Street in May 1918, nine thousand people paid to see them in four weeks. He gave 138 works to the nation; they are in the Imperial War Museum. He was knighted in the Birthday Honours that June.

The picture he rubbed out

In 1919 the Ministry of Information sent him to the Paris Peace Conference to paint three canvases. Two he delivered: A Peace Conference at the Quai d'Orsay, and The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, 28th June 1919, where, as the Imperial War Museum puts it, the extravagance of the architecture reduces the politicians to a footnote.

The third was to be the victorious commanders and statesmen processing into the Hall of Mirrors. He got about thirty portraits down and then, after nine months, painted every one of them out. In their place he left a coffin under a Union flag, two starved soldiers in blanket rags, and two cherubs. The only tangible result of it all, he said, was the ragged unemployed soldier and the dead.

The Imperial War Museum refused it. In 1928 Orpen offered to remove the soldiers and the cherubs; the director wrote back that he would gladly take the picture as it stood. Orpen removed them anyway, and gave the canvas to the museum in memory of Field Marshal Earl Haig.

The Ireland he did not go back to

Orpen did not properly return to Ireland after August 1915. He came once, for a single day, in 1918. After the Rising, Seán Keating tried to persuade him to come home and lead a revival of Irish painting. He stayed in England.

He kept earning — reportedly around £35,000 a year through the 1920s, and up to two thousand guineas for a portrait, of which he painted more than six hundred. He stood for President of the Royal Academy in 1928 and lost. His 1924 memoir, Stories of Old Ireland and Myself, reads like an elegy for a Dublin that no longer existed.

He had been in poor health for years. He fell seriously ill in May 1931 and died in London on 29 September, aged fifty-two. The National Gallery of Ireland never bought his war paintings; for a long time, an Irishman in British uniform was not what the new state wanted on its walls.

Where to see him

The National Gallery of Ireland has The Holy Well, the Lady Gregory portrait and Count John McCormack, bought at auction in 2009. Tate has The Mirror. Manchester Art Gallery has Homage to Manet. The Imperial War Museum holds the war work, and Limerick City Gallery has his portrait of Keating, Man from the West.

The William Orpen collection gathers the portraits, the self-portraits and the Irish pictures as archival prints, framed or unframed; the William Orpen artist page maps his places and works. Every print is open edition and made to order.