Private
Collection
Collection
William Orpen
(1878 - 1931)
The Chinese Shawl
Private Collection
William Orpen (1878 - 1931)
Size:
Height – 35.5cm
Width – 25.5cm
Provenance: Bonham’s, London, 4 July 1985 (lot. 36); Christie’s, London, 9 June 1988 (lot. 35); Sotheby’s, London, 11 October 1989 (lot 49); private collection
Annete and Lubin (recto)
The two protagonists in this drawing are Augustus John and his wife Ida (née Nettleship). Orpen had known both since his Slade School days, where they were all students. It is his commentary on the unorthodox
domestic arrangements of Augustus John, who maintained a ménage à trois
involving Ida and his mistress, Dorelia (Dorothy McNeill), on and off between 1903 and 1907. (For images of Ida and Dorelia see cats. 104 and 105). Even within the bohemian atmosphere of the London Edwardian art set, such an arrangement still attracted disapproval.The more conventional Orpen and his wife Grace would have had sympathy and concern for Ida, viewing her bouts of mental anguish with growing alarm. Ida herself see-sawed between accepting the situation, embracing it with manic enthusiasm and alacrity, and being overpowered with claustrophobia and depression, triggered by the realisation that she was trapped by these same arrangements. Conscious of the effect that the arrangement was having on Ida, Orpen chose to illustrate her dilemma by equating it with one of Jean-Fran√ßois Marmontel’s Moral Tales (1761), Annette and Lubin, which examined the conflict between natural desire and urges (natural law), and the
conventions of society (man-made law). In this image Ida is clearly pregnant; tragically she died shortly after the birth of her fifth son, in March 1907.
Portrait of a Lady (verso; not illustrated) Although the subject has not been positively identified, the lady could be Mrs Augusta Everett. A distant relation of Orpen, Mrs Everett, like Orpen, attended the Slade, and he rented for a time a studio in the basement of her house at 21 Fitzroy
Street, London. Orpen painted her in 1901 as Mrs Everett on the Isle of
Patmos 1901 (Mildura Arts Centre, Australia), holding a scroll and with a finger pointing heavenward. As can be judged from the Isle of Patmos painting, Mrs Everett was not short of religious fervour, and it would be an irony if it were her portrait on the back, as she certainly would have had an opinion about the Johns’ ménage à trois.
The above text is an extract of an essay written by Christopher Pearson, the unabridged version of which can be read in the biography link.
We are grateful to the Orpen Research Project for their assistance in the preparation of this entry. A catalogue raisonné of the oil paintings of William Orpen is currently being prepared by Christopher Pearson of the
Orpen Research Project.
For further inquiries, please contact cmcmp@cmcmp.screaming.net
Sir William Newenham Montague Orpen, Irish-born British portrait painter. He studied art at the Metropolitan School and at the Slade School in London where, at the time, great emphasis was put on the study of old masters.
Born in Stillorgan, County Dublin, William Newenham Montague Orpen was a fine draughtsman and a popular painter of the well-to-do in the period leading up to World War I. He was also involved in the Celtic revival in his native Ireland and he took part in the attempt there to find a visual counterpart to the birth of new national literary language (McConkey 2005). Although his studio was in London, he spent time in Ireland painting, he was a friend of Hugh Lane and influenced the Irish realist painters, like Sean Keating, who were beginning their careers at that time.
Like Sir John Lavery, William Orpen was made an official war painter of the First World War and in 1917 he travelled to the Western Front. He produced drawings and paintings of privates, dead soldiers and German prisoners of war along with official portraits of generals and politicians. Most of these works, 138 in all, are in the collection of the Imperial War Museum in London.
He was deeply affected by the suffering he witnessed in the war and his To the Unknown British Soldier Killed in France first exhibited in 1923 showed a flag draped coffin flanked by a pair of ghostly and wretched soldiers clothed only in tattered blankets. Although widely admired by the public, this picture was attacked by the press and Orpen painted out the soldiers before the painting was accepted by the Imperial War Museum in 1927.
According to Bruce Arnold, writing in Irish Art a Concise History:
“. . . while at times his portraits are rather shallow, he was capable of excellent and sympathetic work, particularly in family and group portraits.”
The same author notes Orpen’s interest in self-portraits and his self-portraits are often searching and dramatic. In his The Dead Ptarmigan -a self-portrait in the National Gallery of Ireland he scowls from the frame while holding a dead ptarmigan at head height.
In a review of an Orpen exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London, Kenneth McConkey (2005) attributes this shallowness of Orpen’s portraits to an emotional exhaustion, a result of what he witnessed as a painter of war; he writes of Orpen’s post war activity:
“Now the portraits were done with mechanical efficiency, and without pause for reflection, save when he scrutinised himself and found a face he could no longer understand. his face… grimaces, it squints, it scowls; in the 1920s it papers over the inner turmoil left by the long pathetic queues of gas-blinded tommies.
Sir William Orpen died, aged 53, in 1931 in London.
