William Newenham Montague Orpen was born at Stillorgan, Dublin on 27 November 1878. He was the son of a solicitor. A child prodigy, he was accepted into Dublin’s Metropolitan School of Art at the age of eleven. Six years later, he entered the Slade, where he studied under Henry Tonks and swiftly established a reputation as a precociously good artist. His contemporaries included Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis. At the Slade, he produced two important paintings, The Play Scene from Hamlet and The Mirror. ‘Orps’ left the Slade in 1897 and embarked upon a career as a highly fashionable and successful portrait painter at his studio in South Bolton Gardens in London. After brilliant success as a student in Dublin and London, Orpen married in August 1901, and spent his honeymoon in Ireland at Lisheens House, Bantry Bay, County Cork. During his stay at Bantry Bay, Orpen painted a great number of works in preparation for his first one-man exhibition at the Carfax Gallery, London, in November of the same year. Throughout his career, Orpen painted ‘parables’ at climactic times in his life, especially during the period 1913-1916 when his series of tortured, allegorical paintings concerned the suffering of his beloved Ireland. In these paintings, Orpen was driven by the need to make a statement about his own life, and to convey a judgement on the world in which he found himself. Orpen’s ‘parables’ were heartfelt; even at the very end of his life, after years of concentrating mainly on portraiture, he returned to parable painting with Palm Sunday (1931). Perhaps the most profound of all such paintings is Orpen’s The Good Samaritan, in which the central, kneeling figure is immediately identifiable as the artist himself. In 1916 Orpen’s friend, the Quartermaster General, Sir John Cowans, arranged a commission for him in the Army Service Corps. That job involved him painting the portraits of senior political figures such as Winston Churchill and Lord Derby. In 1917 Charles Masterman, head of the government’s War Propaganda Bureau recruited Orpen and sent him to the Western Front. There, he executed portraits of generals, privates and politicians, including Sir Douglas Haig, General Hugh Trenchard (father of the RAF) and the Australian architect, General Herbert Plumer. He produced 138 works of art featuring blasted landscapes and dead soldiers in trenches and billets from his experiences on the Western Front. Unfortunately, the desolate beauty of his Zonnebeke (1918) may not be seen, as it remains in storage at the Tate. Among his works were Dead Germans in a Trench, Members of the Allied Press Corps, Ready to Start (a self-portrait in army clothing before he left for the Western Front) British Staff Officer and The Signing of Peace.’ Orpen was appointed portrait painter to the Versailles Peace Conference and his belief that the common soldier was betrayed there by the Allied politicians led him to paint his controversial To the Unknown British Soldier in France which featured a coffin in the Salle des Miroirs, guarded by two wraith-like soldiers, set against the backdrop of the Paris Peace Conference. The triumphalist mood of the hour would brook no criticism and Orpen’s painting provoked a storm of outrage. Before it could be hung at the Royal Academy, (and it was only belatedly accepted by the Imperial War Museum in London) Orpen was required to paint out the image of the two dead soldiers. He didn’t do a particularly good job of it and irony of ironies, in recent years the two painted-out figures have begun to re-emerge from the canvas. His paintings Myself and Venus (Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh) and Leading the Life in the West (Metropolitan Museum of Art) are characteristic of his work and in Orpen’s paintings of scenes of Irish daily life, he is widely credited with creating a new self-image for the Irish. After the war, he returned to portrait painting and produced his Sir Robert Laird Borden (1919) and a splendid David Lloyd George (1926). His best portraits of the period are widely believed to be those of Lady Rocksavage and the Irish singer Count John McCormack. His Sir William McCormick (1920) and Dame Madge Kendal (1928) may both be found in the collection of The Tate. One contemporary noted: ‘An American called on chance at Sir William Orpen’s studio last summer and wanted his portrait done at Orpen’s usual price of three thousand guineas. ‘I’m booked up for six months,’ said Orpen, doing his stuff as they say (negotiating). ‘Too bad,’ said the American, ‘because I’m sailing Friday.’ ‘Oh no you’re not’ said Orpen, pushing the man into a chair. ‘Just you sit there and don’t you bloody well move until I say so.’ Orpen was elected ARA in 1910, knighted in 1918 and elected RA in 1919. His 1924 Self Portrait may be seen in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. Orpen is ranked as one of the most successful, and certainly one of the wealthiest painters ever to have worked in England, but his success could not save him from tragedy. During the last years of his life, he experienced emotional and physical problems, the break-up of his marriage and increasing dependence on alcohol. He died in London on 29 September 1931 aged only 52, from the effects of tertiary syphilis and alcohol. A considerable number of self-portraits and photographs of him are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. His art had to wait until 2005 to receive its first major exhibition ‘Politics, Sex and Death’ – and that somewhat surprisingly, at the Imperial War Museum at Lambeth in London. Fittingly, the critically acclaimed exhibition then travelled to the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. His Portrait of Herbert Barnard John Everett may be seen above.