SIR WILLIAM ORPEN PAINTINGS FOR SALE & BIOGRAPHY
SIR WILLIAM ORPEN
Irish, 1878-1931
William Newenham Montague Orpen was born in 1878 in Stillorgan, County Dublin. He was the youngest of five children, whose father Arthur Herbert Orpen was a successful Dublin solicitor, and whose mother Anne was the daughter of Charles Caulfield, the Bishop of Nassau. “The home where he grew up - ‘Oriel” - was large and comfortable,” writes Robert Upstone. “There were stables for horses and the Orpens were able to indulge their passion for tennis in the extensive grounds. His father was a yachtsman. It must have seemed a magical childhood, steady, loving, protected, and Orpen recalled it in idyllic terms: ‘Life was all joy,’ he wrote, ‘a happy childhood, with not a blot of sorrow to it’.
“One of the great British artists of the first quarter of the twentieth century, Orpen is an intriguing example of a painter who, despite his career as a successful portraitist, remained something of an outsider. While his work is represented in many public collections in Britain, Ireland and America, it does not fit easily into the conventional moulds of art history, and for some decades after his death he was critically ignored…
“A gifted artist from childhood onwards, he was the star of the Slade School of Art, and went on to become one of the most successful painters of Edwardian England; he was an Official War Artist, knighted for his services; he painted the great and the good, and in the 1920s earned extraordinary sums of money for his portraits; he ‘followed his own path’, and was said to be unaffected by modern developments in art; he was altogether uncritical of other painters’ work, of whatever persuasion; ‘he had few prejudices and no opinions’ wrote his friend Sidney Dark in his valedictory memoir, and took the advice given him by the Irish Nationalist politician Michael Davitt: ‘Don’t take any side, just live and learn to try to understand the beauties of this wonderful world’…
“In 1897 Orpen went to London to study at the Slade School of Art and, excused drawing from the cast because of his experience, was admitted immediately to the life class. There he quickly established himself as one of the Slade’s most gifted draughtsmen, rivaled only by Augustus John, and greatly admired by his teachers, Henry Tonks and Fred Brown, as well as his fellow students… Orpen became great friends with Albert Rutherston, and together with Augustus John the trio were christened by Rutherston’s brother William Rothenstein ’The Three Musketeers’.
“It seems as if Orpen’s focus on portraiture in the his subsequent career may have derived from [his] early impulse to commemorate and comment in paint upon those around him. Another impetus, that also directed Augustus John’s professional path, was his circle’s practice of making portrait drawings of each other on evenings in the Fitzroy studios… Such pictures [as The English Nude, shown at the New English Art Club in 1900 to effusive praise], introduce themes that were to preoccupy Orpen throughout his career: imaging himself and others, an attempt to re-fashion the Old Masters into some form of figurative modern painting, his fascination with women, and ultimately, the limits between truth and image.”
[Robert Upstone, ed., William Orpen: Politics, Sex & Death (exhibition catalogue), Imperial War Museum, London, 2005, pp. 7,9-13]
Museum Collections
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, PA
Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford
City Museum & Art Galleries, Birmingham
City Museum & Art Gallery, Nottingham
Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Glasgow Art Gallery, Glasgow
Hugh Lane Municipal Art Gallery, Dublin
Imperial War Museum, London
Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne
Leeds City Art Gallery, Leeds
Manchester City Art Gallery, Manchester
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Municipal Art Gallery, Limerick
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin
National Museum of Fine Arts, Stockholm
National Portrait Gallery, London
Oldham Art Gallery, Oldham
Royal Academy, London
Royal and Ancient Golf Course, St. Andrews
Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin
Slade School of Fine Art, London
Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh
Sheffield City Art Galleries, Sheffield
Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY
St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO
Tate Britain, London
Ulster Museum Belfast
Victorian and Albert Museum, London
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester
