William Orpen — The Society Painter Who Went to War

Irish Artist · 1878–1931

William Orpen

The most brilliant Irish draughtsman of his age — painter of Edwardian glamour, and of the First World War at its most unflinching.

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Homage to Manet by William Orpen

Homage to Manet (1909) — Orpen gathers the writers and artists who shaped him beneath a painting by the master he revered.

The Story

William Orpen was, by common consent, the most technically gifted draughtsman Ireland produced in his generation — and one of the most commercially successful painters in the entire British Isles. He could do almost anything with a brush, and for most of his career he used that gift to paint the rich and the powerful. Then he went to the Western Front, and painted something else entirely.

He was born on 27 November 1878 at Stillorgan, Co. Dublin, the youngest son of a solicitor. A prodigy from the start, he entered the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art as a boy and swept its prizes, before moving to the Slade School of Fine Art in London — then the finest art school in these islands — where he won its top awards alongside Augustus John. His early masterpiece The Mirror (1900), a young woman reflected in a convex glass, announced a painter of extraordinary poise, steeped in the old masters and in the Realism of Édouard Manet.

Through the Edwardian years Orpen became the portraitist of choice for society, painting statesmen, heiresses and celebrities with dazzling fluency and earning a fortune doing it. But he never cut his Irish ties. He taught for years at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, shaping a generation of Irish painters — among them Seán Keating — and he returned again and again to Irish subjects, from the pilgrims of The Holy Well to the light on the sea at Howth.

In 1917 he went to France as an official war artist, and became the most prolific of them all. He painted generals and politicians, but also the ordinary soldier, the dead, and the German prisoner — with a directness that unsettled the authorities. He gave 138 of these works to the nation; they hang today in the Imperial War Museum. Knighted in 1918, he was appointed official painter to the Paris Peace Conference, producing The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles. He died in London on 29 September 1931, aged 52 — a painter who had seen both the glamour and the horror of his century, and set both down with the same unflinching eye.

Timeline

  • 1878 — Born 27 November at Stillorgan, Co. Dublin.
  • 1891–97 — Prize-winning student at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art.
  • 1897–99 — Studies at the Slade School of Fine Art, London.
  • 1900 — Paints The Mirror, an early masterpiece.
  • 1900s–1910s — Teaches in Dublin and becomes a leading society portraitist.
  • 1917 — Sent to the Western Front as an official war artist.
  • 1918 — Knighted for his war work.
  • 1919 — Official painter at the Paris Peace Conference, Versailles.
  • 1931 — Dies 29 September in London, aged 52.

Where He Painted

From the light on Dublin Bay to the pilgrims of the west — click a pin to see the painting tied to each place.

Howth · Dublin Bay · the West of Ireland — the Irish places he returned to.

Featured Works

View all Orpen prints

Collector's Guide

Start where Orpen's ambition is clearest: Homage to Manet, his tribute to the master who shaped him, or the poised early brilliance of The Mirror. For the Irish Orpen, The Holy Well is essential — a monumental vision of pilgrimage in the west. His self-portraits, like Self-Portrait with Sowing New Seed, are among his most searching works, and his portrait of his own student Seán Keating closes the circle of Irish art teaching a new generation. Part of our full Irish Art Prints collection.

The Orpen Lover's Gift Guide

Three ways into his world, at three price points.

Discover Similar Artists

John Lavery — the other great Irish society painter of the age. · Walter Osborne — Irish Impressionism and Dublin life. · John Butler Yeats — portraitist of literary Ireland.