Sir William Orpen N.E.A.C., R.A., H.R.H.A.

(Irish, 1878-1931)

Portrait of Kit 61 x 50 cm. (24 x 19 1/2 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
The Artist
Lady Orpen and by descent to the sitter
Thence by descent
Sale; Whyte's, Dublin, 18 May 2009, lot 64, where acquired by the present owner
The Irish News Collection, Belfast

Exhibited
London, The Royal Academy of Arts, Commemorative Exhibition of Works by Late Members, 1933, no.23
Dublin, The National Gallery of Ireland, William Orpen, 1878-1931, A Centenary Exhibition, 1978, no.86

Literature
Bruce Arnold, Orpen, Mirror to an Age, Jonathan Cape, London, 1981, p.269 (ill.)

In the late twenties, in what were to be the last years of his life, Orpen would, according to his nephew, get down on the floor and play with infants' toys. In the strict social codes of the period, this behaviour was indefensible and John Rothenstein in 1952, rained savage criticism on his long dead uncle accordingly (John Rothenstein, Modern English Painters, Sickert to Smith, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1952, pp.212-227). There could be little justice for a painter who although traumatised by his experiences on the Western Front, and bitterly cynical of Peace Conference hypocrisy, had seemingly turned his back on the mainstream of European Modernism. Rothenstein's words failed to acknowledge the Edwardian fascination with childhood that produced J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan and Rudyard Kipling's Puck. He did not appreciate a period when W.B. Yeats talked of the 'human child' inhabiting 'the waters and the wild', a world of fairy fantasy. And more especially, he closed his eyes to that aspect of the work of Orpen's contemporaries, Augustus John, Charles Sims and the popular illustrator, Arthur Rackham, in which children were idolized and upheld as a synonym for innocence and magic.

Orpen, from the point in 1902 when he painted the infant Clara Hughes, aged 4 1/2, was the most sympathetic recorder of childhood. Famous family portraits depict the offspring of the Swintons, the Vere Fosters and the Nicholsons, and in his child portraits, before 1912 there is an intuitive understanding of child psychology. Watching his two daughters play, Orpen, like many Edwardian intellectuals was enthralled by the imaginative world that seemed to open. The mystic setting for these reveries was Howth, where from 1909, with Grace, his wife, and the girls, 'Bunnie' and 'Kit', he would spend idyllic summer holidays. Here, in 1912, he placed the six year old Kit, precariously 'on a drawing board on top of a sculptor's high stool', to pose for her portrait (Christine, known as 'Kit' (1906-2003) was the Orpens' second daughter. After the First World War, Kit's carefree childhood had come to an end. She trained as a pianist and singer, and even trod the London boards for a little time, making her debut, in 1931, as "A Chelsea Guest" in A.P. Herbert's hunting-cum-Chelsea musical satire Tantivy Towers, at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. Like her father she was a keen and competitive tennis player. In 1933 she married Mr Barrie Nicoll, with whom she had three children. She was widowed in 1955 and remarried twenty years later.). 'As the board overlapped the stool considerably on all sides' she later recalled, 'one was bound to sit absolutely still or have a nasty crash'. Sittings lasted 'only an hour at a time' and were followed by 'a dash along the cliffs for a bathe – golden days'. For enduring this suffering Kit was generously rewarded by being 'paid half a crown an hour for sitting for these portraits – a fortune in those days'. (Quoted from James White ed., William Orpen, 1878-1931, A Centenary Exhibition, 1978, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Ireland, p.49; Arnold 1981, p.269).

Kit posed for Orpen on many occasions on the hilltops and coves around Howth Head. A further portrait, slightly smaller in size, was lent to the Royal Academy Late Members exhibition in 1933, no.135 by Alfred Jowett (unlocated). In addition she appears lying beside her mother in On the Beach, Howth, circa 1910, partially undressed beside her elder sister in On the Beach, circa 1910-12 (unlocated, Arnold, p.268, ill.), sitting on a headland near the Bailey lighthouse in Watching the Yacht Race and The Edge of the Cliff, Howth, circa 1913, sitting with crossed legs and black hat in Kit and posing in striped bathing costume with arms folded in Kit, circa 1913 (all Private Collections). Irish summers required that thick woollen garments were always readily to hand, and thus attired, she sat for her portrait in 1912, in what is the simplest, most direct rendering of her features. As is evident in the present work, Kit had inherited her father's impish eyes – a characteristic which she retained in old age.

The work coincides with the full-length portrait of Noll Gogarty, her playmate at Howth, who is similarly dressed in woollen hat and pullover (see Sotheby's Irish Sale, 8 May 2009, catalogue entry by ORP). Unlike the Hughes portrait, or the Gogarty, or indeed the two versions of Miss Harmsworth, the Ferris St George or Master Spottiswoode, Orpen was not obliged to flatter or please the parents of the offspring he painted, and here he dispenses with quotation from the old masters to confront the six year old's inquisitive gaze. Only in the later watercolour Kit c.1913 is there equal directness (by 1913, Kit's pigtails were gone and her golden hair was cropped in the then fashionable 'Renaissance pageboy' style. The 'bathing costume' watercolour portrait was used for reproduction in a series of facsimiles issued by the Chenil Gallery in 1914.)

A counterpoint to her finely recorded features in the present work is evident in the swift, staccato notation of texture in her clothing and the muted windswept cloudy sky, a familiar backdrop for the Howth compositions. Centrally placed and primly posed with her arms folded she looks out at the spectator with doll-like passivity. In this moment, Orpen was absolved from the need to perform as his daughter adopts her gamine gaze. Nothing has come between them. Orpen, in contrast to his nephew, so well understood, the universal child, the essence of the present portrait.

We are grateful to The Orpen Research Project for compiling this catalogue entry and to Ian Whyte for it's reproduction.