William Orpen was just about the only truly great representative of the visual arts in that strange hour of cultural glory that was Ireland's during the early years of the past century, writes Kevin Myers.
However, his unionist inclinations, and perhaps his close friendships with senior British army officers, in later years caused him to fall out of favour in his native land.
Ideally, artistic standards should never be influenced by political criteria, but of course, the world doesn't work like that; and so for decades the cold wind of political disapproval dispatched the works, and the memory, of William Orpen into a limbo. He was not criticised; far worse than that - he was simply ignored. For he did not fit into the founding tale of the Irish State: his own narrative was a more complex, troubled and ambiguous than a newly emerging identity was capable of accepting.
So other artists who, though very talented, were certainly inferior to Osborne - such as his protégé Sean Keating and Jack Yeats - were incorporated into the national pantheon, while Orpen vanished from popular perception. His rescue from that wilderness a quarter-of-a-century ago in his homeland was really the heroic achievement of one man only - the journalist and critic Bruce Arnold.
Like his near contemporary James Joyce, Orpen was unashamedly interested in sex. All men - and indeed women, though in a less compulsive fashion - are interested in the subject; but to have found genuine artistic expression for it in the Ireland of 100 years ago, which after all could riot at the drop of a shift, required great moral courage and enormous skill. Both men had those qualities.
However, they viewed the expression of their arts in very different ways. Joyce considered that art which had a "kinetic" effect on its viewer was pornographic. Orpen clearly sought to have a kinetic effect on his audience - vide his painting "Early Morning", of a naked young woman sitting on a bed, slightly melancholic, alone and probably post-orgasmic, beside an opened letter - presumably from her lover - a cup of coffee in her hand. We can imagine the prelude to this picture. She has read the letter, which has produced the desired effect, and now later, she drinks her coffee and thinks of and yearns for her absent man. The execution is done with an exuberant but tasteful eroticism, and a wonderful - though non-gynaecological - visual frankness.
The current Orpen exhibition at the National Gallery is entitled "Politics, Sex and Death": actually, Orpen didn't like politicians, but he revered two classes of people: sexual women and soldiers, especially the Irishmen he met as an official war artist on the western front. He was a southern unionist, to be sure, but he never ceased to be an Irishman, nor ever from his home in London failed to renew his connections with Ireland as the new State found its feet. His war paintings remain among the most vital and real of any allied artist, and his portrayal of pitiful whores plying their trade alongside the dead bodies of Tommies speaks of the ghastly realities of the Great War.
The most astounding aspect of this truly wonderful exhibition is the sheer range of Orpen's talents. His portrait of John McCormack - for our younger readers, once a well-known singer - suggests a voluptuous loucheness, with possibly a touch of a hangover, but it is nonetheless affectionate. However, his painting of a golfing Edward Prince of Wales is almost parodically faithful unto detail: unsmiling, tweed-cap, mashie-niblick, but most subversively, and indeed presciently, with an apparent erection within his plus-fours. There is absolutely no affection here: this was purely a paid commission, painted with merely technical, indeed cynical detail, and probably with clenched teeth. On the other hand, his portrait of the much-vilified General Haig is surprisingly sympathetic.
The Great War changed Orpen, and perhaps ruined him: he had seen the worst that the world could do, and after that, art apparently had little meaning. His constant re-working over many years of his tribute to the dead of the war, To the Unknown British Soldier in France, bespeaks a desperate forlornness, a sense that his muse now had one true subject: the men who lay in the clay of Picardy and Flanders. His paintings of the peace conferences in 1919 are technically brilliant, but they are emotionally inert: his heart is clearly not with the politicians there, but lies still with the dead.
By that time, his great work was done - but such work! No Irish artist has ever covered the range that Orpen did, and to such effect: cartoons, portraits, landscapes, nudes, salons and war. Some of his works could have been by Manet, others by Renoir, and others by Sargent, for it was as if he invented a new brush for each painting - but throughout, the eye was always Orpen's.
Look. Dublin is not always a congenial place to be in these days. The traffic is appalling and people's manners frequently worse, but the consolation - for the time being anyway - is that the National Gallery is now host to a collection of some of the greatest works by the greatest Irish artist of all time. Many of the paintings on display are seriously great masterpieces of astonishing subtlety, especially the portraits: the Hebraic hauteur of Lady Rocksavage, the brooding melancholy of Winston Churchill, the witty self-disparagement of the artist himself.
This is the most important and enthralling exhibition of the works of an Irish painter in the entire history of the National Gallery. It would be insanity itself to miss it.