A GREAT PAINTER

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 81, 2 October 1931, Page 5

A GREAT PAINTER

SIR WILLIAM ORPEN

SURENESS OF DESIGN

Catholicity, sensitiveness, and a passion for experimentation were the marks of Sir William Orpen, whose death has left'ilnglish art much poorer. Orpen had the humour and high spirits of the Irish; he also had a severely classical training which left its marks on him all through his life. The subdued harmonies which marked his earlier pictures were soon sublimated into something richer and more .free, but the strait discipline of his early days,in Dublin influenced his drawing to the end. Despite his rich pallette, his evident delight in full harmonies in tfhich he swept the spectrum, he.was never,a modern of. the moderns,;. He painted with rapidity and with Irish fluenpy. His pictures, even the earliest of them, are full of. confceits .and little jokes. .

In the midst of the grimmest of experiences, his fout years as official, artist in the World. War; he, could pause'to paint such things as "Changing Billets" or "Adam and Eve in Peronne," could preserveK his . characteristic delight in incident—"Bombing: Night," in which a huddled group waits tensely for thß next explosion, and "The Deserter,", where ( the war-racked man cowers on ' his' form—could indulge, in his vnorthodoxy as in "Beady to Start/ where a table; stands littered with the good thingg. of life and. the mirror behind it shows tie', artist, fur'coated and steel-lielme|ed^ .about .to begin another day'of %vart.:.:;Btwe : he was.repeating a theme used m 1910, when he painted the quaintly-conceived "Myself and Venus?' and repeated,in "Leading the Life in the West." :,, ' . ' , '

HIS PORTRAITS.

That war period which" consumed so much of his early maturity camo ,-after he was established as a portrait painter. Perhaps Qrpen painted too. many portraits. Not, all of them, are good, for no man can paint a fine portrait -to order, and the- : Orpen who 'hademerged from the Slade school at a great period in its history with the habit of lighting on the visible essentials of character and making a picture^ which for all its brilliant surface had; the • suggestion of a: cartoon was not the man' to paint these sedate and: extroverted soldiers-witli-. success. His war, pictures contain some v that" are : stolid.and some that "will remain of interest only to the historian. His other portraits contain much that is splendid, with surenessof colour handling and of design. . ■ Like Sargent he made little jests about his paintings. >- Sargent had his "Worm's Eye. View," and Orpen could. title his. self-portrait ."Myself and "Venus." In a. very different way, lie had the stincts of Cezanne.. That; apostle 6t modern painting- was forever ■ setting himaelf problems of realisation, Orpen was forever following the path* of trial and error,: an experimenter to the last. Light and the play of light on surf aces captured him;early: in his career, and while still in the early 'twenties he Was striving to master: them. Everything that -was pain table claimed him; he was able to; paint "the many object^ in his series of self-portraits witi'more attention than he was willingto bestow upon himself, and there have fcagn'times when he showed more sympathy in the broadcloth 1 of his model's mat than in his model of the momenta Even in the great of the signing of the Pe,ace-Treaty--he was more concerned with the play and interplay of light in the Hall of Mirrors than with the grave gentlemen who met to conclude the great peace. HIS CHIEF THEME. rY«t humanity; has been his chief interest, from, the time when he painted his """mischievous "Hamlet." He has treated it wilfully, mockingly, for, like tfl'pty;:6f his countrymen, ho is a satirist atjiiCeart. . The whole bright pageant of 'the rspectriim fascinated him, and wifcfe;-an art founded upon a faultless' -technique he has painted great things' when his interest was aroused. Sensitive, ioo, he retreated from the grimmest,' things of war, dealing with tho flotsam of battle rather than the brutality of attack or.counter-attack.: He would'render by suggestion, with.his men'ieated waiting in the 42nd stationary hpspital, his German prisoners or his "Death Among the Wounded in the Snow>2- ••■ After the war his art entered its richest, fullest phase, and it is the nation's tragedy that" chance has cut this short.-' ""''; ■'"-' ■