A GREAT PAINTER

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21414, 11 February 1933, Page 9 (Supplement)

A GREAT PAINTER

SIR WILLIAM ORPEN Rather more than a year after his death two friends of Sir William Orpen, an art critic and an editor, have joined in producing a worthy memorial in print to his life and work. Orpen was undoubtedly one of the great painters of the modern era. He may not rank as an innovation with Cezanne and Matisse, or with the great Impressionists, but to openminded art-lovers of to-day his work seems in the true line of succession from the joyous masterpieces of the High Renaissance and the three following centuries. .< What place he will hold in British art a century hence is hard to determine, but as a portrait painter and an inter- ' preter of the Great War his fame seems assured. Orpen's two friends, Mr. P. G. Konody and Mr. Sydney Dark, have each contributed half the book and have tried to write of him separately as artist and man. Needless to say, they have not avoided overlapping; for example, Mr. Dark has been led into a quite long dissertation on Orpen as a portrait painter, and Mr. Konody cannot exclude many personal recollections. Born in Ireland in 1878, Orpen was a precocious genius. At twenty-two he caused a sensation by showing at the New English Art Club a picture, " The Mirror," so mature and masterly that few could believe it to be the work of a young man. Thereafter he became a brilliantly successful painter of portraits and " conversation pieces," and a knighthood followed ten years later. Then came the Great War. After a period of homo service, Orpen was sent to Fiiance as an official artist in 1917. He was shaken out of himself, and his interpretation of what he saw, both on canvas and in his book "An Onlooker in France," has a signficance that will probably be better realised in future years than it is to-day. Afterwards he painted many portraits at the Peace Conference, but to him the politicians' manoeuvrings were simply opera-bouffe. He could not forget what he called The simple soldier man. Who, when the Great "War first began, Just died, stone dead, From lumps of lead. In mire, Or lived through hell. Words cannot tell For four lonif years. Finally Orpen painted out all his figures of statesmen in the Hall of Mirrors and replaced them with the Unknown Soldier's catafalque guarded by two corpses in steel helmets, and thereby brought official disapproval upon his head. After the war he resumed his work as a portrait painter, and worked feverishly for a dozen years against recurrent illness. At fifty, his biographers agree, he was burned out," and he died at fifty-two, leaving an immense output, much of it truly great and none of it even mediocre. The book is a fine tribute to a man of genius and rare spirit. It is admirably illustrated with over sixty reproductions of the best of Orpen's work. " Sir William Orpen, Artist and Man," by P. G. Konody and Sidney Dark. (London, Seeley, Service and Company.)