A Sketch for 'The Irish Wedding'

Our sense of The Western Wedding, Orpen's contribution to the New English Art Club Winter exhibition in 1914, can now only be obtained from sketches, studies and photographs of the finished work. The picture shows a group of peasants attending an open air wedding ceremony in the West of Ireland. Three female figures stand behind the kneeling couple and these are the subject of the present study. The group may well have been influenced by Piero della Francesca, an artist who was greatly admired at the Slade in the early years of the century. In both his works in the National Gallery in London - The Nativity and The Baptism of Christ - there is a female chorus that could have provided inspiration. The former also includes the Virgin kneeling in prayer, to the side of the group. Orpen would have known these works very well and borrowed extensively from them for all three of his Irish allegorical works.

The models are, from right to left, Orpen's daughters, Kit and Mary, and their second cousin, Eileen Cosgrave. The kneeling figure is Connie Martin. The group and the kneeling figure praying were favourites of Orpen, and he used them a number of times. The Connie Martin study was re-used for instance in Nude Pattern, The Holy Well, in a more faithful replication of the present study. The whole group was re-used in a modified form in one of Orpen's last pictures, Palm Sunday A.D. 33 (private collection). In this the group is reversed and clothed differently with the girls holding palms. It is possible that the present study may have been done towards the end of Orpen's life, when he over-painted a number of works, and also over-painted photographs.

This work will be included in the catalogue raisonné currently being prepared by Christopher Pearson of the Orpen Research Project.