William
Orpen, the son of
a Dublin solicitor was born in Stillorgan, County Dublin in 1878.
He studied at the Metropolitan School of Art
in Dublin and the Slade
School in London, where his fellow
students included Augustus John and Wyndham
Lewis. At the Slade he produced two important paintings, The
Play Scene from Hamlet and The
Mirror. Orpen soon became known for his portraits of public
figures and during his career produced over 600 of these pictures.
In 1916 Orpen's friend, the Quartermaster General, Sir
John Cowans, arranged for him to receive a commission in the
Army Service Corps. This mainly involved him painting the portraits
of senior political and military figures such as Winston
Churchill and Lord Derby.
In 1917 Charles Masterman,
head of the government's War
Propaganda Bureau (WPB)
recruited Orpen and he was sent to the Western
Front. While in France he painted portraits of Sir
Douglas Haig, Hugh Trenchard, Herbert
Plumer and Ferdinand Foch. Orpen was
shocked by what he saw at the front and also painted pictures such
as Dead Germans in a Trench.
Other pictures painted in France included Members
of the Allied Press Corps, Ready
to Start,
The
Signing of Peace.
Orpen was commissioned to paint portraits of the politicians at the
Versailles Peace Conference. Orpen
believed that the soldiers that fought in the war were betrayed by
the politicians at Versailles. Instead of the portraits he painted
To
the Unknown British Soldier in France.
The original painting showed the draped coffin flanked by two ghostly
figures of soldiers standing guard. There was such an outcry when
it was exhibited in 1919 that Orpen was forced to paint out the soldiers.
After the war Orpen
returned to portrait painting, including one of David
Lloyd George (1926). Sir
William Orpen
died in 1931.
Sir William Orpen, British Staff Officer (1918)
Forum Debates
Art, Resistance and Propaganda in the Great War
War Propaganda Bureau
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