William Orpen: Artist of Life and The Battlefield
He loved paint, he loved the gleam of it…
William Orpen thought of himself as Irish, but often repeated that he owed everything to England, his adopted home. In his day he was the most admired and respected of artists, and one of the wealthiest, making huge sums as a society portraitist: earning, in 1930, the year before he died, £90,000 which, in today’s values is a staggering £5.5m. His only rival in those far off days was his fellow Slade student, Augustus John.
His output was staggering too — with many hundreds of canvases produced in a relatively short period — and he undoubtedly became the leader of what we might call the ‘English Art Movement’ of the first third of the 20th century, with a handful of his paintings now considered some of the greatest and most original works of art of that period. Not unsurprisingly his work has inspired many renowned artists of the second half of the 20th century, not least Lucien Freud, David Hockney, and, in this century, Eve Parnell.
He was also one of the finest war artists the British Isles has ever produced, who was described by the Daily Graphic in the 1920s as the “ …Samuel Pepys of the Western Front.
And it’s that period of his life I would like to comment on here.
