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Birth of Goddard Henry Orpen, Lawyer & Historian

Goddard Henry Orpen, lawyer and historian, is born in Dublin on May 8, 1852, the fourth son of the five sons and three daughters of John Herbert Orpen, barrister, of Dublin, and Ellen Susanna Gertrude Richards, youngest daughter of Rev. John Richards of Grange, County Wexford.

For most of his childhood Orpen’s family lives at 58 St. Stephen’s Green. He is educated at Abbey CBS, a Christian Brothers secondary school in Tipperary, County Tipperary, and in 1869 enters Trinity College Dublin (TCD), where he displays early academic aptitude, obtaining exhibitions and scholarships and being elected a foundation scholar. He graduates BA with first-class honours in 1873 and four years later is called to the English bar at the Inner Temple, London.

On August 18, 1880, in St. Peter’s Church, Aungier Street, Dublin, Orpen marries Adela Elizabeth Richards, the daughter and heiress of Edward Moore Richards, engineer and the landlord of Grange, County Wexford. Adela is his first cousin once removed, her great-grandfather and his grandfather being the Rev. John Richards. They live for two decades after their marriage at Bedford Park, Chiswick, London, with their daughter Lilian Iris (b. 1883) and son Edward Richards (b. 1884). Soon after their marriage, he begins taking lessons in the Irish language in line with his passionate interest in Irish historical and antiquarian research, which gradually supplants his languishing legal career. He translates and edits a French rhymed chronicle about the Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland, entitled The Song of Dermot and the Earl (1892), the title which he gives it and by which it has since generally been known in English. He also translates Émile de Laveleye‘s Le Socialisme Contemporain (The Socialism of Today, 1884), to which he adds a chapter on English socialism.

After Adela’s father transfers ownership of his estate to her in 1900, now renamed Monksgrange, the Orpens reluctantly leave London to live there, enabling Orpen to devote his time fully to research and writing. His major work is Ireland Under the Normans (Vols. 1–2, 1911; Vols. 3–4, 1920), which argue that the Norman invasion benefited the Irish, leading to advances in agriculture and trade.

Both before and after his death Orpen’s work is the subject of hostile criticism from those with more nationalist inclinations, starting with Eoin MacNeill in a series of lectures delivered in 1917. Despite his own eminence as a scholar of medieval Ireland, MacNeill resorts to unfair polemic in his attack on Orpen, caricaturing his account of pre-Norman Irish society and disregarding the more subtle nuances in his views of the English Irish relationship. In this he has been followed by generations of other scholars and readers, overlooking the depth of Orpen’s research, the perceptiveness of his interpretations, and the extent of his fieldwork on the archaeological evidence from the medieval period. Orpen takes the study of Anglo-Norman Ireland out of the realm of vague antiquarianism and professionalises it. His standards are not those of “the gentleman-amateur” as might be expected from his background, but of the twentieth century “scientific” historian, and he is therefore now widely regarded as the founder of the professional study of Anglo-Norman Ireland. Perhaps the most striking evidence of the continued validity and relevance of his work is that his four-volume Ireland Under the Normans has been twice republished in more recent years, in 1968 by Oxford University Press and in 2002 in a one-volume version by Four Courts Press.

Orpen is elected a member of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland (RSAI), serving as president in 1930–32), and the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) (1911), and contributes historical articles to their journals as well as to periodicals such as The American Historical Review (1913–14) and The Cambridge Medieval History (1932, 1936). A lecture to the New Ross Literary Society is later published as New Ross in the Thirteenth Century (1911). He also contributes a major chapter on the medieval church to the second volume of Walter Alison Phillips‘s History of the Church of Ireland (1934). Though his literary work is recognised by an honorary doctorate from TCD in 1921, he feels increasingly isolated as Monksgrange is targeted during the Irish Civil War and raided on several occasions. On religion he lists himself as an agnostic in the 1911 census.

Orpen’s final work is The Orpen Family, a personal family history printed for private circulation in 1930. A portrait of Orpen (above) by Seán O’Sullivan hangs in Monksgrange.

Orpen dies on May 15, 1932, at Monksgrange, and is buried alongside his wife Adela in St. Anne’s Churchyard, Killanne, County Wexford. His very extensive papers, including correspondence, manuscripts and drawings, as well as records and papers of the Orpen family, are held at Monksgrange. Included there is a very large collection of his photographs, a skill in which he notably distinguishes himself. A small collection of his correspondence is also held in the National Library of Ireland (NLI).

(From: “Orpen, Goddard Henry” by Philip Bull, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009, revised March 2021 | Pictured: Portrait of Goddard Henry Orpen by Seán O’Sullivan)


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Birth of William Orpen, Irish-born Artist

Major Sir William Newenham Montague Orpen, KBE, RA, RHA, Irish artist who mainly works in London and is best known for his vigorously characterized portraits, is born on November 27, 1878, at Oriel, Grove Avenue, Stillorgan, County Dublin. He also works as an official war artist during World War I.

Orpen is the fourth and youngest son of Arthur Herbert Orpen (1830–1926), a solicitor, and his wife, Anne Caulfield (1834–1912), the eldest daughter of the Right Rev. Charles Caulfield (1804–1862), the Bishop of Nassau. Both his parents are amateur painters, and his eldest brother, Richard Caulfield Orpen, becomes a notable architect. His nieces are Bea Orpen and Kathleen Delap. The historian Goddard Henry Orpen is his second cousin. The family lives at “Oriel,” a large house with extensive grounds containing stables and a tennis court. He appears to have a happy childhood there.

Orpen is a naturally talented painter, and six weeks before his thirteenth birthday is enrolled at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. During his six years at the college, he wins every major prize there, plus the British Isles gold medal for life drawing, before leaving to study at the Slade School of Fine Art in London between 1897 and 1899. At the Slade he masters oil painting and begins to experiment with different painting techniques and effects.

While at the Slade, Orpen becomes engaged to Emily Scobel, a model and the subject of his painting The Mirror (1900). She ends their relationship in 1901, and he marries Grace Knewstub, the sister-in-law of Sir William Rothenstein. He and Knewstub have three daughters together, but the marriage is not a happy one. By 1908, he has begun a long-running affair with Evelyn Saint-George, a well-connected American millionairess based in London, with whom he also has a child.

Orpen first exhibits at the New English Art Club (NEAC) in 1899, becoming a member in 1900. In 1901, he holds a solo exhibition at the Carfax Gallery in central London. His portraits, which establish his reputation, show the influence of the Realist artist Édouard Manet. He also becomes known as a painter of group portraits such as Homage to Manet (1909), in which he portrays members of the contemporary English art world sitting in conversation beneath a famous portrait by that artist.

At the start of World War I, a number of Irish people living in England return to Ireland to avoid conscription. Among them is Orpen’s studio assistant and former pupil, Seán Keating. Keating encourages him to do likewise, but he refuses and commits himself to supporting the British war effort. In December 1915, he is commissioned into the Royal Army Service Corps and reports for clerical duty at London’s Kensington Barracks in March 1916. Throughout 1916 he continues painting portraits, most notably one of a despondent Winston Churchill, but soon starts using both his own contacts and those of Evelyn Saint-George, to secure a war artist posting.

He is the official painter of the Paris Peace Conference after World War I. Throughout 1919 he paints individual portraits of the delegates to the Conference and these form the basis of his two large paintings, A Peace Conference at the Quai d’Orsay and The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors. In both pictures, the architecture overwhelms the gathered politicians and statesmen who’s political wranglings and vainglory diminish them in Orpen’s eyes.

Orpen is appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1918 and is elected an associate of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1919.

Orpen becomes seriously ill in May 1931, and, after suffering periods of memory loss, dies at the age of 52 on September 29, 1931, in South Kensington, London, of liver and heart failure. He is buried at Putney Vale Cemetery in southwest London. A stone tablet in the Island of Ireland Peace Park Memorial at Mesen, Belgium, commemorates him. He is posthumously regarded as a facile and prolific, but somewhat superficial, artist who nevertheless achieves great popularity in his day.

(Pictured: “Self-portrait” (1913), oil on canvas by William Orpen, Saint Louis Art Museum)