Details of next month's Irish art sale at Christie's are currently being distributed, and they show this to be another excellent opportunity to review examples of work by the country's best-known artists. The fourth such Irish art sale organised by the English auction house, it offers all the usual names, including Lavery, O'Conor, Yeats, Osborne, Henry and Leech. A particularly interesting lot is a 1916 self-portrait called The Man from Aran by Sir William Orpen, which carries a pre-sale estimate of £500,000ú800,000.
This was originally commissioned by Mrs Howard St George, along with Orpen's The Holy Year (now in the National Gallery of Ireland), which was painted in the same year. The self-portrait, for which £500 was paid, remained in Mrs St George's collection until after her death in 1935; it was subsequently sold by Sotheby's in July 1939 for £880.
In 1983, the work was bought by its present owner from the Pyms Gallery in London. As Bruce Arnold comments in Orpen, Mirror to an Age (1981), "Not since Rembrandt has an artist so consistently examined himself and recorded his own face, as Orpen did, from early youth to the end of his life".
The artist's output is marked by a series of such self-portraits, the first group appearing around 1899/1890 just after he had left the Slade School of Fine Art. Throughout his life, Orpen would dress up in different guises when painting himself.
Portraiture, of course, is what made Orpen's name during his lifetime. His brother-in-law, Sir William Rothenstein, later condemned the artist as settling on the "golden treadmill" of portrait commissions, and they were certainly very profitable for him. According to Bruce Arnold, by the mid-1920s he could charge £2,000 for a portrait and his annual income was in the region of £35,000.
The Man from Aran bears certain similarities to another Orpen self-portrait, The Dead Ptarmigan, dating from 1910, which is now in the National Gallery of Ireland. However, although the painter has twisted his body around in both instances, he has not distorted his features in the work being offered by Christie's as he did in The Dead Ptarmigan.
This may be because The Man from Aran had been commissioned by Mrs St George, who had been his mistress since 1912. Born in 1870 (and therefore eight years the artist's senior), Florence Evelyn St George was the eldest child of a wealthy New York banker, George Baker. In 1891, against her father's wishes, she married Howard Bligh St George, a Co Kilkenny land agent.
Howard St George was a cousin of Orpen's so it was inevitable that his wife would meet the artist. Their affair began around the time Mrs St George moved to London, where she took a house in Berkeley Square; since 1908, Orpen had been living in The Boltons.
During this period, he painted Mrs St George's portrait, a magnificent affair in dulled gold and silver which featured in the exhibition, The Swagger Portrait, held at London's Tate Gallery in 1992/93.
Once the affair became publicly known, Orpen and his mistress were known as Jack and the Beanstalk since he was shorter than average and she was more than six feet tall. By mutual agreement, the relationship ended in 1921 because the scandal was becoming too great. It used to be considered that The Man from Aran was painted in 1909, but a date of 1916 has now been given to it. Although Orpen had long been based in London, where most of his commissions were found, he never forgot his Irish origins, which helps to explain the nature of his costume on this occasion.
Against a dark blue background, Orpen's traditional Irish dress of woven tweed stands out in shades of mustard and brown. A strong source of light to the right of the picture bathes one side of the work in a rich glow, while he stares out at the viewer with a defiantly frank gaze. It is at once a conventional and subversive picture which seems to prefigure paintings by one of Orpen's most famous students, Sean Keating.
Christie's's Irish Art Sale takes place in London on Thursday, May 20th. Highlights from the sale will be on view at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, Cultra, Co Down on April 22nd and 23rd, and at the Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin, on April 26th and 27th.
