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Lot Essay
William Orpen’s ‘WAR’ exhibition at Agnew’s in May 1918, coupled with the gift of its entire contents to the fledgling Imperial War Museum, made him a celebrity. Suspicions concerning his health and mental state were dispelled and he returned to the trenches for a second tour. Although there were more portraits to paint, the ‘grotesque romantic’ tendencies noted by the Burlington Magazine critic, became more insistent, leading the artist to some of his most unnerving allegories. The present canvas is one of the most challenging of these.
Here a soldier, resting on kit-bag pillows, and taken from a magisterial drawing produced on the Arras road, looks on as his comrade passionately embraces his barefoot girlfriend – a surviving occupant of one of the bomb-blasted ruins that surround them. The neat delineation of these dilapidated edifices is taken from drawings such as The Warwickshires entering Péronne.
This is mere scene-setting for the dramatic fanning across the night sky of four searchlights – a reminder of the increasing importance of aerial bombardment. These created, according to James Laver, ‘a wonderful design’ in which the figures and a wall ‘its shutter hanging by a single hinge’, appear in an ‘unnatural glare’. (Portraits in Oil and Vinegar, 1925, p. 73).
Orpen waited until the winter of 1929 before sending Changing Billets, Picardy along with Armistice Night, Amiens (Private Collection) and The Mad Woman of Douai (Imperial War Museum) to the New English Art Club. They were, according to the press, a reminder of the artist’s ‘amazing technical ability’ expressed in the ‘full variety of moods – satire, sentiment, comedy …’ The Bystander reported one irate visitor condemning the exhibition as ‘pretentious nonsense’, but added ‘I do not believe him’ for in the artist’s works there was ‘much to be enjoyed’. Orpen’s war allegories had evidently outlasted the devastating circumstances of their creation. He had, as Arnold Bennett astutely observed, in the WAR catalogue, witnessed and recreated ‘the landscape, shell-holes, ruined trees and buildings … the tragedy and comedy of human existence … as though no one had ever seen them before’.
Professor Kenneth McConkey
Here a soldier, resting on kit-bag pillows, and taken from a magisterial drawing produced on the Arras road, looks on as his comrade passionately embraces his barefoot girlfriend – a surviving occupant of one of the bomb-blasted ruins that surround them. The neat delineation of these dilapidated edifices is taken from drawings such as The Warwickshires entering Péronne.
This is mere scene-setting for the dramatic fanning across the night sky of four searchlights – a reminder of the increasing importance of aerial bombardment. These created, according to James Laver, ‘a wonderful design’ in which the figures and a wall ‘its shutter hanging by a single hinge’, appear in an ‘unnatural glare’. (Portraits in Oil and Vinegar, 1925, p. 73).
Orpen waited until the winter of 1929 before sending Changing Billets, Picardy along with Armistice Night, Amiens (Private Collection) and The Mad Woman of Douai (Imperial War Museum) to the New English Art Club. They were, according to the press, a reminder of the artist’s ‘amazing technical ability’ expressed in the ‘full variety of moods – satire, sentiment, comedy …’ The Bystander reported one irate visitor condemning the exhibition as ‘pretentious nonsense’, but added ‘I do not believe him’ for in the artist’s works there was ‘much to be enjoyed’. Orpen’s war allegories had evidently outlasted the devastating circumstances of their creation. He had, as Arnold Bennett astutely observed, in the WAR catalogue, witnessed and recreated ‘the landscape, shell-holes, ruined trees and buildings … the tragedy and comedy of human existence … as though no one had ever seen them before’.
Professor Kenneth McConkey