Sir William Orpen

Sir William Orpen 1878-1931, British portrait and genre painter, b. Ireland. He is best known for his scenes of Irish daily life, his paintings and sketches of life at the front in World War I, and his portraits. His paintings Myself and Venus (Carnegie Inst., Pittsburgh) and Leading the Life in the West (Metropolitan Mus.) are characteristic of his work. Orpen was knighted in 1918. Although not a profound talent, he was the most popular painter of his day.

Orpen, Sir William (1878–1931). British painter, chiefly famous as one of the leading fashionable portraitists of his day. Orpen was a child prodigy and had a brilliant student career at the Slade School. He worked mainly in London but he kept up links with his native Ireland, teaching part-time at the Metropolitan School in Dublin, 1902–14. His style had much in common with that of his friend Augustus John, being vigorous and painterly but sometimes rather flashy. He was at his best when he was away from his standard boardroom and drawing-room fare, and his numerous self-portraits are often particularly engaging, as he pokes fun at himself in character roles. Up to the First World War he had a steady rise in worldly success and after the war he earned an average of about £35,000 a year, rising to over £50,000 a year in 1929—a colossal sum then. In 1920 a story appeared in London newspapers that he had refused an offer of £1,000,000 to work for a dealer in the USA, and he was one of the few British artists of his time capable of attracting public attention in such a way. Apart from portraits, Orpen also painted genre subjects, landscapes, interiors, nudes, and allegories, and he did memorable work as an Official War Artist in France (he also attended the 1919 Peace Conference in Paris and painted a large group portrait showing the Signing of the Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, 28 June, 1919 (Imperial War Mus., London)). His reputation faded badly after his death but revived greatly in the 1970s.

Orpen, Sir William (1878–1931), portraitist and painter of subject pictures. One of the most celebrated Irish artists of his generation, he had an enormous—some say overwhelming—influence on Irish painting up to the mid‐20th century. He was educated at the Metropolitan School of Art, Dublin, and the Slade School of Art, London, where he won the coveted Life Painting and Composition prizes. Although he lived in London from 1902, Orpen visited Dublin regularly till 1914, teaching at the Metropolitan School. His artistic prowess brought him many honours and he was an academician of both the Royal Academy and the Royal Hibernian Academy. A war artist during the First World War, his experiences had a profound effect on him and he recorded some of the most stirring images of that conflict. Afterwards, however, he never quite recovered the confidence of his earlier days. He was knighted in 1918 and the following year was resident artist at the Paris Peace Conference. Also an author, in 1924 he published his war memories as An Onlooker in France and this was followed by Stories of Old Ireland and Myself (1924). In Kenneth McConkey's words, Orpen was ‘the essential Edwardian painter’.

Bibliography

Arnold, Bruce , Orpen: Mirror to an Age (1981)

S. B. Kennedy