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Lot Essay
In his semi-autobiographical Stories of Old Ireland and Myself, (1924), William Orpen reveals an inner conflict. Published just three years after the creation of the ‘new’ Ireland, its random reminiscences refer to the days of his youth when the country remained under British rule. During the Edwardian years he made annual visits to teach for a month at time at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin – sessions that brought him into contact with Celtic Revival worthies – those who, in the words of WB Yeats, ‘lived where motley is worn’ and who are satirized in drawings such as A Talented Picnic and I meet AE in the Street, the latter an encounter with the poet/painter and polymath George Russell.
Orpen had little time for these ‘intellectuals’, calling them out on one embarrassing occasion when Anna Pavlova danced in the city in January 1912. His natural sympathies were more with the habitués Jim Larkin’s Liberty Hall Soup Kitchen.
However, the world of Yeats-ian ‘motley’ is the subject of the present work in which the artist’s studio assistant, Séan Keating, takes on the title role. With theatrical flair he declaims his verses to a blond vamp reclining on Tarzan’s cushions. It is an extraordinary image that unites zebra hides, and a huge armorial drape with a cast of Andrea Verrocchio’s Putto with a Dolphin – studio properties that identify the artist’s abode at ‘Oriel’, 8 South Bolton Gardens, Kensington. All, including the crystal wall lights appear in contemporary photographs.
Although painted before his war service, Orpen did not unveil this work until after it. One reviewer found it a ‘pleasant change’ from his scenes of the Western Front, while another hailed it as a ‘dramatic set-piece’. Thoughts in this instance must have turned towards more histrionic treatments of the subject such as Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Catullus reading his poems at Lesbia’s house, 1870 (Private Collection). Orpen’s overhaul of the historical genre reshapes such themes. His actors could not be more modern and their setting, more fashionable - ‘smart’, according to a reviewer. It was here that he stored Sir Hugh Lane’s Impressionist masterpieces, and here where George Moore had recounted his reminiscences of Manet and Degas – a cosmopolitan world where no ‘motley’ was tolerated. Deeply serious, The Poet almost anticipates Yeats’s late poem, Politics, and of course, WH Auden’s oft-quoted maxim that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’.
Professor Kenneth McConkey
Orpen had little time for these ‘intellectuals’, calling them out on one embarrassing occasion when Anna Pavlova danced in the city in January 1912. His natural sympathies were more with the habitués Jim Larkin’s Liberty Hall Soup Kitchen.
However, the world of Yeats-ian ‘motley’ is the subject of the present work in which the artist’s studio assistant, Séan Keating, takes on the title role. With theatrical flair he declaims his verses to a blond vamp reclining on Tarzan’s cushions. It is an extraordinary image that unites zebra hides, and a huge armorial drape with a cast of Andrea Verrocchio’s Putto with a Dolphin – studio properties that identify the artist’s abode at ‘Oriel’, 8 South Bolton Gardens, Kensington. All, including the crystal wall lights appear in contemporary photographs.
Although painted before his war service, Orpen did not unveil this work until after it. One reviewer found it a ‘pleasant change’ from his scenes of the Western Front, while another hailed it as a ‘dramatic set-piece’. Thoughts in this instance must have turned towards more histrionic treatments of the subject such as Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Catullus reading his poems at Lesbia’s house, 1870 (Private Collection). Orpen’s overhaul of the historical genre reshapes such themes. His actors could not be more modern and their setting, more fashionable - ‘smart’, according to a reviewer. It was here that he stored Sir Hugh Lane’s Impressionist masterpieces, and here where George Moore had recounted his reminiscences of Manet and Degas – a cosmopolitan world where no ‘motley’ was tolerated. Deeply serious, The Poet almost anticipates Yeats’s late poem, Politics, and of course, WH Auden’s oft-quoted maxim that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’.
Professor Kenneth McConkey