Major William Orpen mopped his muddy brow and clenched his paintbrush. The 29-year-old artist from Dublin was feeling distinctly uncomfortable. Earlier on that hot July day he had pitched his easel in one of the many trenches that riddled the Ypres battlefield in southern Belgium.
Orpen took his seat and began to paint the rotting corpses of two soldiers – one German, one English. It was, he later recalled, ‘just skulls, bones, clothes, rifles, water bottles etc’.
However, after a couple of hours, he began to feel ‘sort of strange.’
‘I did not know if I was lonely or afraid – so I put down my palette and went a few yards back and sat down – when suddenly a huge puff of wind came and blew over my heavy easel, canvas and all, tearing the canvas to bits on the stump of a shelled tree.’
It took Major Orpen some time to recover his composure although he did, it should be noted, ‘sit down and start on a fresh canvas’.
Within a week of Orpen’s canvas being ripped on the stump at Ypres, the battle of Passchendaele erupted all around him. By early November, over half a million British and German soldiers lay dead.
Meanwhile, Orpen made his way to the Somme where, on a single day in July 1916, over 5,500 Ulstermen had been killed. Every day still more men died. It was, Orpen grimly observed, ‘nothing but devastation, desolation and khaki.’
There can be no doubt that Orpen’s experiences as an official war artist during the First World War had a profound effect on both his artistic and psychological temperament. It also caused him to turn to alcohol with a vengeance after the war, and so drove the most gifted Irish artist of his generation to an early grave.
The spotlight is back on Orpen’s wartime experiences following a remarkable discovery by the National Library of Ireland earlier this month. [December 2010]
Staff at the Library have lately begun a systematic review of over 3,500 boxes of unsorted and generally very dull legal documents which have ben held in storage for many decades past.
Amongst these are several hundred boxes which were handed into the National Library by a legal firm called Orpen & Sweeney. One of the founders of this company was AH Orpen, William’s father.
And in one of those boxes an archivist chanced to discover ten letters written by Orpen to his father, dated between 1901 and 1917. The find represents a terrific source for Orpen’s innumerable admirers worldwide, as well as a considerable incentive for those archivists entrusted with exploring the remainder of the National Library’s legal collection.
William Newenham Montague Orpen was born in the wet autumn of 1878. His family lived on Grove Avenue, Stillorgan, then an affluent, bustling village in south Dublin. The Orpens were a Protestant family whose forbears had settled in Kenmare, County Kerry, in the late 17th century, but later moved to Dublin.[i]
Orpen’s artistic genius was apparent from an early age. In 1891, the 13-year-old was accepted at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art where he won every prize that came his way.
At the age of 18, he entered London's Slade School where he befriended the artists Augusts John and Albert Rutherston; they became known as ‘The Three Musketeers’. All three had an eye for ladies and Orpen was already showing himself to be a gifted seducer of pretty women.
In 1900, Orpen became engaged to marry Emily Scobel, the Slade School model and aspiring architect featured in his painting ‘The Mirror’. However, later that year the 22-year-old Dubliner met and became besotted with Grace Knewstub.[ii] Her father John Knewstub had been studio assistant to Ford Madox.
Amongst the newly discovered letters are some, written in 1901, in which the young man was evidently trying to persuade his father that marrying Grace was a good move. Orpen senior’s refusal to warm to the concept prompted the artist to lament, ‘I suppose it is the lot of all men to fall in love... but not always with the right person’.
Whether his father approved or not, Orpen married Grace later that year. She became mother to their three daughters but the marriage was ultimately an unhappy one.
Orpen was away for long periods of time, sometimes on assignment with canvas and brush, sometimes carousing with Rutherston and John.
Inevitably other women entered his life – models, pupils and patrons alike.
In 1908, the year he first exhibited in London’s Royal Academy, Orpen began a serious affair with Mrs Evelyn St George, the leggy American wife of a land agent from County Kilkenny. Evelyn’s father was George F. Baker, the enormously wealthy president of the National Bank of America. She started as Orpen’s patron but soon became his model and mistress.
The St. George’s lived at Clonsilla Lodge in Dublin and also at Screebe Lodge by Maam Cross in Connemara. The affair blossomed at these two houses and also in a flat in London’s Beverley Square where they regularly met. As Evelyn was a slender six feet tall and Orpen measured just over five feet, they became known as “Jack and the Beanstalk”.
In 1912, the affair became talk of society when Evelyn bore Orpen’s fourth daughter, Vivien. However, when George Baker learned of the affair, he swiftly put a stop to it.
Orpen was teaching at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin when the First World War broke out. He joined the British Army but did not see action until 1917 when the War Propaganda Bureau promoted him to Major and sent him to the Western Front as an official British war artist.[iii]
Assigned to paint portraits of all the top brass, he began with Field Marshall Haig who suggested he would be better employed concentrating his brush on the ordinary soldiers at the front.
Orpen took Haig at his word and set off for the front. A painting called Ready To Start, produced in early June 1917, just before he headed for the trenches, suggests that the Dubliner was still in mischievous form. The painting depicts a soldier bedecked in fur gazing moodily at a whiskey bottle and a soda siphon.
Further frolics were to be had when he smuggled the beautiful Sybil Sassoon out to the Somme battlefield by hiding her on the floor of his Rolls Royce; women were not allowed into the war zone.
However, as the newly discovered letters show, the next few months were to considerably dampen Orpen’s sense of humour. [iv] He was shocked by the harsh reality of trench life, of the endless bodies and limbs strewn across battlefields, of the lunar landscapes crated by the incessant bombing, of zombie-eyed faces ravaged by poisonous gas.
He was also uncomfortable watching such horrors unfurl from what he saw as his own perspective of relative privilege and comfort.
He continued to paint as requested although his works, always poignant, became ever more disturbing and bleak. Works like ‘Dead Germans in a Trench’ challenged the self-interested ‘frocks’ or politicians whom he blamed for the carnage of war. At the end of the war, 138 of Orpen’s works made their way back to the Imperial War Museum in London where many are on display today.
Orpen was knighted in 1918 for his work as a war artist and Grace became Lady Orpen. However, Sir William would show no signs of let up with his lust for other women. Not long after his canvas was ripped by the tree-stump in Ypres, he met Yvonne Aubicq, a young French woman with whom he had a 10-year-long romance. When they parted, he gifted her his Rolls Royce along with Grover-Williams, his chauffeur. Yvonne then married Grover-Williams who became a Grand Prix racing driver but was later captured and executed by the Nazis.[v]
In 1919, Orpen was resident artist at the Paris Peace Conference at Versailles. During the 1920s, he continued to be one of the most- sought-after society portrait artists in London, making close on €1.45 million a year in today's terms.
Winston Churchill, Woodrow Wilson and Count John McCormack all sat for him, although he is probably better known for his exquisite portraits of beauties like Vera Hone and Lady Evelyn Herbert.
However, like so many others, Orpen never got over his wartime experience. He was constantly haunted by ‘the soldiers who remain in France forever.’
Increasingly morose, he began drinking heavily. Failure of both liver and heart brought about his death, aged 52, in September 1931. He was survived by Lady Orpen, their three daughters Christine, Diana and Mary, and also by his daughter Vivien.
With the centenary of the First World War looming ever closer, it seems certain that Sir William Orpen’s stock will simply continue to rise. The newly discovered letters, which will further boost his stock, go on display at the National Library on Kildare Street, Dublin, from 16th March 16 2011
FOOTNOTES
[i] They lived in Oriel House on Grove Avenue, Stillorgan. Sir William's brother Richard Orpen (1863 - 1939) was Cathedral architect for both St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin and St Canice's in Kilkenny. He also served as President of the Incorporated Law Society from 1915 - 1916.
[ii] In 1906, Orpen and Grace’s brother Jack Knewstub established the Chenil Gallery where Orpen used to buy canvases with had a distinctive “signature” mark.
[iii] Orpen later recounted his wartime experience in his book, ‘An Onlooker in France’.
[iv] That eerie occasion when his canvas was torn by the tree stump was recalled in a three-page letter written on 25th July 1917. ‘I got rather a fright about myself the other day’, he wrote. ‘I was working some distance away from the car among the trenches, painting the remains of a Boche [German] and an Englishman – just skulls, bones, clothes, rifles, water bottles etc and, after a couple of hours, I began to feel sort of strange. I did not know if I was lonely or afraid – so I put down my palette and went a few yards back and sat down – when suddenly a huge puff of wind came and blew over my heavy easel canvas and all, tearing the canvas to bits on the stump of a shelled tree. This did not make me feel any better and it was as much as I could do to sit down and start on a fresh canvas’.
Orpen then explains how he met a French artist who had a similar experience when he visited the same trench the following day. Orpen took this as reassuring news; his reaction had not been unnatural
[v] Yvonne became a major patron of Crufts and was a celebrated breeder and judge of Highland terriers.