The sitter was Elizabeth Stebbins Carstairs, of Lockport, New York and Paris. Her husband, Charles Stewart Carstairs (1865-1928), ran the London branch of the dealers Knoedler and Co for more than two decades and advised collectors including Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Mellon — which placed the Carstairs household at the centre of the transatlantic art trade in the years Orpen was its most sought-after portraitist.
Orpen painted her in 1914, on the eve of the war that would redirect his career entirely. Three years later he was an official war artist on the Western Front. This is the London society painter at full stretch, in the last season before that world ended.
The painting was shown at the Royal Academy's memorial exhibition of Orpen's work in the winter of 1933, two years after his death. Mrs Carstairs kept it until her own death, and it passed to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1952 as her bequest. Between 2013 and 2017 it hung on extended loan in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington.
Sir William Orpen (1878-1931), born in Stillorgan, Co Dublin, trained at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin and the Slade School in London, becoming one of the most successful portrait painters of his generation. His work hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland.
Sizes & Format
30 × 30 cm / 12 × 12″
50 × 50 cm / 20 × 20″
70 × 70 cm / 28 × 28″
100 × 100 cm / 40 × 40″ (unframed only)
Available framed (black, white, wood) or unframed
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