Orpen

This Year is the centenary of the birth of the Anglo-Irish artist, William Orpen. A major exhibition of his works is now at the National Gallery of Ireland

I visited the battlefields of the Somme this summer. At six o'clock on a grey September morning I drove from Amiens to Albert, and then out along the road to Bapaume. Absolutely straight, it rises and falls gently over the Picardy countryside, one of the great arteries of war. Ten thousand men in a day passed down it to their deaths sixty and more years ago, and the evidence of the carnage punctuates the route with tragic regularity; names, memorials, cemeteries, graves.

At Beaumont Hamel, where so many Irishmen died, the battlefield itself has been left as a memorial. The trenches have fallen in, the shell-craters have grown over with grass, the supports for the barbed wire are deeply pitted with rust, and only a few fragments of bombs and shells remain. It is a little space, a few acres; yet thousands died here, and it is impossible to look down at any patch of ground, now covered with green grass, that did not once soak up human blood.

In the spring of 1917, William Orpen sat in just this place, besides the dead body of a young soldier. The battle had moved on, and the burial of the dead was slowly being carried out. The corpse was bleached bone, bleached uniform. Curly, golden hair still grew from the skull, moving in the slight breeze, and beside it there was a daffodil in bloom.

The incongruity provided Orpen with his vision of war. To some extent it also provided him with his vision of life. Sean Keating said of him, "He was various. He could contain multitudes." And in all that he did there was this strange sense of contradiction, the reeversal of ideas, the conjunction of oppoosites, the questioning of the unquestionnable.

He was the most substantial of all the first world war artists, covering all its aspects, repeatedly bringing together the bizarre contrasts of life and death. The sun beats down on the white rubble that ·was once a town, flowers grow, a black cat stalks along, grown fat on the fat rats that have fed on the corpses. The soldiers he painted were symbols of the many aspects of war; he extracted from the mixed feelings and confusions paatience, fear, shock, courage, compassion, despair.

He painted the war from 1917 to the Armistice, then he painted the Peace. He was knighted in 1918, but it was five years before he could get over his shyyness and go for his investiture. By then he was the most famous artist in Enggland, and the most successful. Throughhout the twenties his life consisted of an endless succession of society men and women sitting for their portraits. He led during that time a life divided between his home and his club, his wife and his mistress, and his studios in London and in Paris.

He did not return to Ireland after 1918. It has been suggested that Sinn Fein sought his complicity, specifically in connection with the death of Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson, and that the response to his refusal was a threat on his life. Whether true or not, his commmitments left him little time for the kind of carefree holidays he had spent in Blackrock, Howth and in the west of Ireland in the years leading up to the first world war, and he cut himself off. It was a different Ireland, anyway. He grasped this clearly enough, as can be seen from his sentimental book of 1924, Stories of Old Ireland and Myself But there were deeper forces' behind the whimsy with which he looked back on the past. Fame had packed him into a particular course of action: he was the prisoner of his ambition, his generosity, the great love affair of his life with Yvonne Aubicq ; he was the prisoner of the thirty or forty wealthy sitters who turned up in their Rolls Royce motor cars at his grand studio in South Bolton Gardens every year, pinning him down to a more or less faithful delivery of their appearance and character on cannvas for the massive sum, then, of £2000 or £3000.

Thus he painted his way out. At the end his mind became unbalanced, and he was more or less in constant care for the last couple of years, occasionally making pathetic returns to the studio, to daub at fresh canvases, or repainting old ones with usually bizarre results.

He died in September, 1931, and was buried in Putney. He left over £160,000. He was soon forgotten. His fame in his lifetime had made many men jealous. After his death, after the many stories about him had vanished from the pages of papers, his reputation declined. He was mentioned as a phenomenon, not as an artist; his earning power was of greaater importance than his paint.

Only in Ireland was the memory kept green. Primarily by Sean Keating, who had been Orpen's student, and then his studio assistant, before the first world war, but also by other first or second generation acolytes, Tuohy, Whelan, Campbell, the realism and the sense of drama which is a distinct eleement in Irish art, remained. It turns us back towards this strange and varied painter's Irish origins.

The family came from Kerry. William Petty had a direct ancestor of William Orpen's as his agent there in the late seventeenth century, and this founder of the family fortune was a man of prodigious courage and enterprise. The artist's branch of the family included churchmen in the eighteenth century and lawyers in the nineteenth. Orpen's father and grandfather were both soliciitors.

He was the youngest of five children.

He was sent to the Metropolitan School of Art, now the National College of Art, a couple of months before his thirteenth birthday, and was unquestionably the star pupil during the seven years of his studies. Contrary to general opinion, as well as his own, he received a good artisstic education there, and responded enorrmously well to it, winning all the immportant prizes then available throughout the art schools of the British Isles, and going off to the Slade School in London formidably equipped to succeed.

He was the best there, in a generation that included Augustus John, Wyndham Lewis, Spenser Gore, Harold Gilman and Ambrose McEvoy.

For much of the period from the early 1900s until the first world war he mixed portraiture, landscapes, nudes, and subject painting with an emphasis on drama and satire and intense human realism.

Divisions entered his life. He lived in London, taught and holidayed in Ireeland. He tried unsuccessfully, to draw a line and keep a balance between his proofessional career as a portrait painter, and his life as an artist. He attempted to keep up with what was then avant garde represented by the New English Art Club, but at the same time he became an associate of the Royal Academy. He, who loved his children deeply, had an affair which disrupted his domestic happiness, and forced up the pace of his life to a point where he started drinking.

In a curious way, when the first world war came, it committed him to a single line of action for the first time in his life. For about four years, from the spring of 1917 until he had completed the Peace Conference paintings, he worked on one huge task with a singleeness of purpose that he had never really had before, and was never to have again.

In respect of so much of his work one is tempted to see him as having lost his way. In reality his fault as an artist was that he had too many ways, and could not ultimately fulfil himself in any of them.

He painted some of the finest English nudes of the twentieth century, some of the finest portraits. His early work, with its sombre tones, its impeccable compoosition and sense of line, and its taut dramatic tension, is repeatedly rnagniificant. His series of paintings for which the local Chelsea washerwoman, Lottie, was the model, are great works of twentieth century art.

In his thirties he developed from the sombre tonality of the early works to a lightness of colqur which was most darring. He never lost the basic Slade School sense of line, but he filled it in the gollden summers before the first world war, with the fullest expression of his splenndidly joyful palette.

The size and scope of the National Gallery's centenary exhibition covers the diversity of his talent in a generous and stimulating way. There are some breath-taking discoveries, a few' gaucherries, one or two mistakes, but in general the prodigality of choice gives a fair flavour of the complete man.

He was that, in spite of unevenness, diversity, society's pressures, and the eventual disintegration. And through the many works in the National Gallery, assembled in such numbers for the first time since his death almost half a cenntury ago, this face shines through .•