William Orpen
1878–1931 · United Kingdom · Edwardian art, Portrait painting, Figurative art
The story
By 1917 William Orpen, an Irish painter born near Dublin in 1878, was one of the most sought-after society portraitists in London. That year the British government made him an official war artist and sent him to the Western Front, and what he saw there changed the kind of pictures he wanted to make.
When the fighting stopped he was kept on to record the peace. He was the official painter at the Versailles conference of 1919 and was commissioned to produce three large canvases of it. One of them, The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, shows the delegates dwarfed by the gilded room around them. It became the most expensive British art commission of the whole war: Orpen was paid £3,000 for it, ten times what John Singer Sargent, the leading portraitist of the day, received for his far larger war painting Gassed.
Orpen had grown to dislike the politicians he was painting, and he said so. For the last of the three canvases he eventually painted out the assembled statesmen altogether and left a flag-draped coffin guarded by two ragged soldiers. He died in London in 1931, his health broken, at 52.
