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Lot Essay
Exactly a year after the Easter Rising in Dublin, William Orpen found himself heading for the Western Front as an Official War Artist. His reputation as a portrait painter had gone before him and it was expected among the General Staff that they would be his priority. However, once he had painted Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig KT, GCVO, KCIE, and Major General Hugh Townsend of the Royal Flying Corps, he was keen to make it clear that his brief was much wider than the portrayal of military leaders in uniform, and he moved closer to the theatre of war. Travelling ‘up the line’, the long straight road from Arras to Bapaume, he found a highway peopled by exhausted soldiers and littered on either side with the debris of battle. By the summer, having passed through the shattered villages of Combles and Péronne, he had reached the Somme, and was looking across the torn terrain to the hillock, or ‘butte’, of Warlencourt, the scene of some of the bitterest recent fighting near the village of Le Sars.
‘It looked’, he recalled, ‘very beautiful in the afternoon light’, glowing ‘… pale gold against the sky’. As he moved closer, he observed that this scene of eerie tranquillity had been transformed, and the once verdant farmlands were converted into masses of chalky rubble, pockmarked with deserted dugouts and the bodies of the enemy dead.
With winter approaching, Orpen groped for ways in which to address the deep feelings this experience had unleashed, in works such as A Highlander passing a Grave (Imperial War Museum, London) and with the news of Auguste Rodin’s death in November, his thoughts may well have turned to his celebrated Thinker of 1905, the classic colossus that emerged from his unfinished Gates of Hell commission. The French master had been a popular figure in Edwardian Britain, visiting London as President of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, a role that Orpen himself would eventually occupy. A large London retrospective of the sculptor’s work in 1914 guaranteed instant recognition for Orpen’s source.
Parody was Orpen’s forte. Everyone would get the message that after centuries of western civilisation, stretching back to the Greeks, it had come to this. The idea was then sketched in watercolour, and shown at the painter’s ‘WAR’ exhibition of 125 paintings and drawings at William Agnew’s London gallery, the following May.
Such was the success of this exhibition that critics, especially that of the influential Burlington Magazine, encouraged the painter to go further by developing his ‘piquant sense of the grotesque-romantic’ for ‘the amplification of his impressions’, using some of ‘the many figure studies and landscapes sketches in the exhibition’ (vol. 34, July 1918, p. 35). The present canvas takes up this challenge. Orpen darkens the sky for the oil version, dramatically projecting the figure onto the picture plane. Piquancy does indeed describe the infantryman’s facial expression – it was one that the quizzical painter perfected in the mirror. And garbed in the accoutrements of modern warfare, he must be asking ‘Why?’.
Professor Kenneth McConkey
‘It looked’, he recalled, ‘very beautiful in the afternoon light’, glowing ‘… pale gold against the sky’. As he moved closer, he observed that this scene of eerie tranquillity had been transformed, and the once verdant farmlands were converted into masses of chalky rubble, pockmarked with deserted dugouts and the bodies of the enemy dead.
With winter approaching, Orpen groped for ways in which to address the deep feelings this experience had unleashed, in works such as A Highlander passing a Grave (Imperial War Museum, London) and with the news of Auguste Rodin’s death in November, his thoughts may well have turned to his celebrated Thinker of 1905, the classic colossus that emerged from his unfinished Gates of Hell commission. The French master had been a popular figure in Edwardian Britain, visiting London as President of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, a role that Orpen himself would eventually occupy. A large London retrospective of the sculptor’s work in 1914 guaranteed instant recognition for Orpen’s source.
Parody was Orpen’s forte. Everyone would get the message that after centuries of western civilisation, stretching back to the Greeks, it had come to this. The idea was then sketched in watercolour, and shown at the painter’s ‘WAR’ exhibition of 125 paintings and drawings at William Agnew’s London gallery, the following May.
Such was the success of this exhibition that critics, especially that of the influential Burlington Magazine, encouraged the painter to go further by developing his ‘piquant sense of the grotesque-romantic’ for ‘the amplification of his impressions’, using some of ‘the many figure studies and landscapes sketches in the exhibition’ (vol. 34, July 1918, p. 35). The present canvas takes up this challenge. Orpen darkens the sky for the oil version, dramatically projecting the figure onto the picture plane. Piquancy does indeed describe the infantryman’s facial expression – it was one that the quizzical painter perfected in the mirror. And garbed in the accoutrements of modern warfare, he must be asking ‘Why?’.
Professor Kenneth McConkey