Estudios Irlandeses, Number 0, 2005, pp. 39-50 __________________________________________________________________________________ AEDEI ‘Old Ireland and Himself’: William Orpen and the Conflicts of Irish Identity By Roy Foster Hertford College, Oxford Copyright (c) 2005 by Roy Foster. This text may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author. Abstract: The Irish painter William Orpen (1878-1931), defined here as Ireland’s most ‘Spanish’ painter, was out of fashion for fifty years after his death; but he has recently been dramatically revalued, with his works fetching huge prices in salerooms and an unprecedentedly large exhibition of his work being mounted in London and subsequently Dublin. Best known for his Edwardian portraits and his devastating paintings of the First World War, he also produced a series of allegorical paintings of his native Ireland. These are discussed in this article, and linked to his admiration for J.M.Synge, his dislike of clericalism and repression in Irish life, and his celebration of sensuality. The same themes lie behind ‘Homage to Manet’, a celebrated group portrait which includes the Irish novelist George Moore and the art collector Hugh Lane —a close friend of Orpen’s. Orpen knew other figures of the cultural Revival, and his relation to them is discussed; as is the conflict of identity he experienced (like other middle-class Irish Protestants) when the radicalisation of Irish politics and the outbreak of the First World War put a new strain on the allegiances of people who had previously thought of themselves as both ‘British’ and ‘Irish’. After the trauma of the War, and Irish separation, Orpen opted for Britain; but, it is argued, he was closer to elements of the Irish cultural revival, and more involved with Irish politics and Irish history, than is usually accepted. Key Words: William Orpen, Stories of Old Ireland and Myself, Irish Protestant, cultural Revival, Irish identity. The painter William Orpen seems an Orpen a mesmeric influence, as it also did apposite subject for the first issue of a new upon Picasso); and his brother-in-law William Spanish journal of Irish studies. He has Rothenstein wrote one of the first influential recently been re-valued as not only a great critical studies of Goya in English (1900), Edwardian portrait painter but also the creator which Orpen read closely.1 A turning point in of an astonishing series of haunting and his own artistic odyssey came when he visited apocalyptic scenes of war, which dominated Madrid with the Irish art dealer, collector and the large exhibition shown at the Imperial War connoisseur Hugh Lane; the Prado collection Museum and later the National Gallery of introduced him to the dark side of Goya, and Ireland in the spring and summer of 2005; he the influence comes strongly through his has, as will be seen, been claimed by both paintings of wartime devastation a decade Britain and Ireland. But he also painted in a later. [See Plate nº 1, ‘The Madwoman of distinctly European tradition, and was above Douai’] The influence of Ribera and the all influenced by Velasquez and Goya. Many Seville school is also marked in Orpen’s early of his portraits and genre paintings contain work. His later oeuvre, in its starkness, its references to the former (a portrait of the artist blackness, its angry interrogations of William Nicolson’s family is a direct homage religiosity, marks him as the most Spanish of to ‘Las Meninas’ —a painting that exerted on Irish painters. __________________________________ His Irishness became something of an issue ISSN 1699-311X 40 when the catalogue for the 2005 exhibition 1922: an era when Orpen was very much alive, first appeared; on the cover Orpen was and painting dynamically. But that is also the described as ‘one of the great British artists’ of era of the First World War, which was closely the early twentieth century, which ruffled some connected with the progress and direction of feathers at the National Gallery of Ireland. the Irish revolution; and which changed Orpen, it appears, is once again Irish. For Orpen’s life too. Orpen’s short and dazzling many years after his death in 1931 he was out career, and the artistic inheritance he of fashion: seen as an over-privileged bequeathed, are closely related to ‘Old Ireland’ wunderkind, who inherited Sargent’s mantle as —as he called it in his random book, Stories of a painter of ‘swagger portraits’ for London’s Old Ireland and Myself— but his life spanned elite, made a fortune, lived immorally (some of the transformation to ‘new Ireland’, and his his greatest portraits were of his mistresses), paintings may be read against these upheavals declined into vulgarity with his savage war too —as, perhaps, may his ultimate paintings of 1917-19, and drank himself to disillusionment and decline. death aged only fifty-two. Now that rich Irish collectors are prepared to pay well over a I million euros for an Orpen painting, his stock That book, ‘Stories’, is a curious ramble, but is high once more and he is once again claimed there may be more art in it too than is first for Ireland. However, for Orpen’s life and thought. Writing in 1924, just after the end of times, there is an argument that ‘British’ could the Civil War in Ireland and the birth of the include and encompass a certain kind of new independent Irish Free State after years of Irishness. ‘Englishness’ is of course different. guerrilla war and military repression, Orpen When Bruce Arnold was researching his Orpen was trying to conjure up the douceur de vivre book in the 1970s he received much help from of a world long gone, and a world which he Orpen’s daughter Kit Casey, and in January had painted and sketched with such brilliance: 1978 she sent him a very firm rebuttal of a the leisured life of the Irish upper middle comment by her father’s pupil, the painter classes in the Edwardian era. [See Plate nº 2, Sean Keating, that Orpen represented a ‘A Breezy Day, Howth’] In Stories, Orpen colonialist strain in Irish history. She rhapsodizes about Ireland as a lost world, a emphasised how Irish the family was, how vanished playground: much they loved Ireland, how they all expected to end up living there permanently; though her I remember when I came to live in London, father ‘admired and loved’ England, he was at the age of seventeen, the first Sunday I 2 spent there a fellow student asked me to go completely Irish. That letter echoes the tone of many Irish out for the day with him. I called at his place th in the early morning. Said he. ‘What shall Protestants from the 19 century on: affection, we do?’ ‘Let’s go to the sea or up the displacement, a slight bewilderment. At the mountains’, said I at once. And he ‘laffed time of Orpen’s birth in 1878, the Orpen and laffed’. But he did not understand that I family traditions were certainly Protestant, had always lived in Dublin, and expected the haut-bourgeois, ‘establishment’; the distant sea and the mountains to be close by For ancestors were 17th-c ‘planters’ (though from Dublin as a city has wonderful points about a Royalist tradition), and his mother’s family its position. How pleasant it was of a were the aristocratic Charlemont connection; summer morning, ‘when we were free!’ and but by the 19th century long-established ‘all was hospitality’, to drive out in the Protestants like them felt completely Irish, doctor’s big car [Oliver Gogarty’s Rolls Royce] to ‘Lamb Doyle’s’, that wonderful while adhering to the Union with Britain. It is inn on the Hill of Step-a-Side which lies an attitude reflected in many Irish memoirs and near the base of the Three Rock Mountain, other writings, notably from Somerville and so named from the three enormous rocks on Ross. But these records, like Kit Casey’s much its summit, which one can see clearly from later letter, are written in an era when the ‘old Howth twelve miles away! The view from Ireland’ that accommodated the easy sense of ‘Lamb Doyle’s’ pub on a summer morning, belonging in both countries (and sustaining a as you sit in the shade on a bench outside the privileged position in both), which Orpen grew house and look back over the bay, with up with, was long gone. It went, of course, in Dublin on the left, and Howth, with the decade of Irish revolution from 1912 to Ireland’s Eye, and Lambay behind! On the 41 right Kingstown, Dalkey and Bray Head, all He met his doom- of them in the blaze of the midday sun! This Tim Kelly’s early grave.’ view, with the sweet fresh smell of the And how they drove away on the outside country in your nostrils, a cigarette in your car, after the murders, through the mouth, and your glass beside you, truly you Castleknock Gate. could feel life in all its glory, yourself And ‘Buckshot’ Forster. having only left the crowded, hot city some twenty minutes before; in fact, you could ‘Parnell for ever O. leave Dublin at noon and get all this joy, and Buckshot the beggar O. be back in the city, have lunch, and be ready Take him to the slaughter yard for work at two o’clock.(Orpen 1924: 43-4) And hang him up for leather O.’ And the arrest of Parnell from brave The closing reference to ‘work’ is Morrison’s Hotel when he tried to escape by characteristic, but for Orpen and his friends, the yard.