William Orpen — The Society Painter Who Went to War
Irish Artist · 1878–1931
William Orpen
The most brilliant Irish draughtsman of his age — painter of Edwardian glamour, and of the First World War at its most unflinching.
Homage to Manet (1909) — Orpen gathers the critics, dealers and painters at the centre of his London world beneath a Manet then owned by Hugh Lane.
The Story
William Orpen was, by common consent, the most technically gifted draughtsman Ireland produced in his generation — and one of the most commercially successful painters in the entire British Isles. He could do almost anything with a brush, and for most of his career he used that gift to paint the rich and the powerful. Then he went to the Western Front, and painted something else entirely.
He was born on 27 November 1878 at Stillorgan, Co. Dublin, the youngest son of a solicitor. A prodigy from the start, he entered the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in 1891, six weeks before his thirteenth birthday, and swept its prizes — including the British Isles gold medal for life drawing — before moving to the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where he took the composition prize in 1899 among a year that included Augustus John, Gwen John and Wyndham Lewis. His early masterpiece The Mirror (1900), now in Tate, a portrait of Emily Scobel built around a round mirror in open homage to Van Eyck, announced a painter of extraordinary poise, steeped in the old masters and in the Realism of Édouard Manet.
Through the Edwardian years Orpen became the portraitist of choice for society, painting statesmen, heiresses and celebrities with dazzling fluency and earning a fortune doing it. But he never cut his Irish ties. He taught part-time at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art from 1902 to 1914, introducing the nude model to the life class and shaping a generation of Irish painters — among them Seán Keating — and until 1915 he returned again and again to Irish subjects, from The Holy Well to the light on the sea at Howth.
In 1917 he went to France as an official war artist, and became one of the most prolific of them all. He painted generals and politicians, but also the ordinary soldier, the dead, and the German prisoner — with a directness that unsettled the authorities. He gave 138 of these works to the nation; they are in the collection of the Imperial War Museum. One of them, To the Unknown British Soldier in France, he built by painting out some thirty finished portraits of generals and statesmen and leaving a coffin in an empty marble hall. Knighted in 1918, he was appointed official painter to the Paris Peace Conference, producing The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles. He had been in declining health for years; he fell seriously ill in May 1931 and died in London on 29 September, aged 52 — a painter who had seen both the glamour and the horror of his century, and set both down with the same unflinching eye.
The fuller story — the Slade prodigy, the students he taught in Dublin, the Somme, and the Versailles canvas he destroyed and rebuilt — is told in William Orpen: the Irish painter who walked away from Ireland.
Timeline
- 1878 — Born 27 November at Stillorgan, Co. Dublin.
- 1891–97 — Prize-winning student at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art.
- 1897–99 — Studies at the Slade School of Fine Art, London.
- 1900 — Paints The Mirror, an early masterpiece.
- 1902–14 — Teaches at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art; becomes a leading society portraitist.
- 1917 — Sent to the Western Front as an official war artist.
- 1918 — Knighted (KBE) in the King's Birthday Honours.
- 1919 — Official painter at the Paris Peace Conference, Versailles.
- 1931 — Dies 29 September in London, aged 52.
Where He Painted
From the light on Dublin Bay to the pilgrims of the west — click a pin to see the painting tied to each place.
Howth · Dublin Bay · the west of Ireland — the Irish places in his work.
Featured Works
Collector's Guide
Start where Orpen's ambition is clearest: Homage to Manet, his tribute to the master who shaped him, or the poised early brilliance of The Mirror. For the Irish Orpen, The Holy Well is essential — not a devotional picture at all, but a deliberate challenge to the idealised image of Irish piety, with his student Seán Keating looking on in Aran clothes. His self-portraits, like Self-Portrait with Sowing New Seed, are among his most searching works, and his portrait of his own student Seán Keating closes the circle of Irish art teaching a new generation. Part of our full Irish Art Prints collection.
The Orpen Lover's Gift Guide
Three ways into his world, at three price points.
- The Mirror — art print · from €55
- Young Ireland — Grace Gifford — art print · from €60
- Trees at Howth — framed print · from €90
Discover Similar Artists
John Lavery — the other great Irish society painter of the age. · Walter Osborne — Irish Impressionism and Dublin life. · John Butler Yeats — portraitist of literary Ireland.