Some Men and a Picture (Study for Homage to Manet)

Details

SIR WILLIAM ORPEN, R.A., R.H.A. (1878-1931)
Some Men and a Picture (Study for Homage to Manet)
signed and dated 'William Orpen 1907' (lower left)
pencil, ink and watercolour on paper
9 x 7¼ in. (22.8 x 18.4 cm.)
Executed in 1907.

Provenance

Anonymous sale; Christie's, Dublin, 29 April 1985, lot 156, where acquired for the present collection.

Literature

Exhibition catalogue, When Time Began to Rant and Rage: Figurative Painting from Twentieth Century Ireland, London, 1998, p. 34, illustrated.
K. McConkey, Memory and Desire, Painting in Britain and Ireland at the turn of the Twentieth Century, London, 2002, pp. 203-225, illustrated.

Exhibited

London, Pyms Gallery, Orpen and the Edwardian Era, November-December 1987, pp. 84-85, no. 29, illustrated, as 'Some Men and a Picture'.
Compton, Watts Gallery, William Orpen, Method & Mastery, November 2019 - February 2020, pp. 21-29, exhibition not numbered.
Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Championing Irish Art: The Mary and Alan Hobart Collection, April - July 2023, p. 43, illustrated, exhibition not numbered.

Conditions of sale

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Lot Essay

Some Men and a Picture is the only extant known preparatory study for Orpen’s Portrait Group (Homage to Manet), 1909 (Manchester City Art Galleries) remaining in a private collection. It shows the Irish writer, George Moore on the left, with figures on the right who became Philip Wilson Steer, Walter Sickert, DS MacColl, Hugh Lane and Henry Tonks in the final painting. A proposed sequence for the five studies (three in Manchester City Art Galleries and one in the National Gallery of Ireland) is set out in McConkey, 2019, in which the present work is no. 3. The ‘picture’ is of course, Edouard Manet’s celebrated, Eva Gonzalès (National Gallery, London/Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin).
Professor Kenneth McConkey

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