Summer Afternoon (Artist in his Studio with a Model)

By the eve of the First World War, William Orpen was the most commercially successful painter working in Britain, the man London society went to for a fluent, flattering portrait. Around 1913 he turned that skill on himself and made a joke of it. The setting is his own studio in South Bolton Gardens, on the edge of Chelsea, with a tall leaded window opening onto a garden in summer leaf. Orpen stands in the middle in a pale working jacket, brush in hand, striking the pose of a great artist at work. On the left, the model he is supposed to be painting sits on a stool and yawns. The Museum of Fine Arts calls his gesture mock-heroic, and it suits a painter known among his friends for his wit, who painted himself many times and seldom solemnly. The picture left Britain early. In 1920 it was sold at auction in New York, where the Boston collector John Taylor Spaulding bought it, and it came to the museum with his bequest in 1948.