Critics of productions and exhibitions are read with interest by those planning to see them or who have already seen them. The good reviewer should, in most cases, encourage people to go and judge for themselves.
Not many people from the South are familiar with the fine opera festival, enjoying its 20th anniversary this year, in a converted outbuilding at Castle Ward near the picturesque village of Strangford. This Carmen, with Louise Innes in the title role, and Antoni Garfield Henry as the desperate and deluded Don José, provides real drama in a co-production that can be seen at Cork Opera House in early July.
The Arts Council under a previous dispensation showed a disdain for the commercial success of the Gate Theatre. Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan is not merely a sumptuous costume drama, but one that explores double standards. It shows that the world cannot be divided into the black and white that is still so often the preferred political, media and moralistic mode of interpretation.
The Millennium Wing of the National Gallery and the exhibitions staged there are a source of pride in one of our foremost cultural institutions. The Orpen exhibition, running till the end of August, has already attracted a large volume of visitors.
Whether or not it achieves critical perfection, to the public it is interesting and lively, and contains not just well-known works but some outstanding pictures, including the portrait of Le Chef de L'Hôtel Chatham.
The main biography of Orpen (published in 1980) is by Bruce Arnold. A shorter life of Orpen by Arnold, published in 1991 by the National Gallery, acknowledges his seminal importance to 20th-century Irish art, and rebalances the longer biography, which tended to put more emphasis on him as a British artist.
As a lover of art, it was a great honour to be invited to open the exhibition and to use it as the reference point for a lecture on the Anglo-Irish tradition in the early 20th century.
A feature of Anglo-Irish families was the extent to which they were interrelated (or inbred, if one wishes to be critical). Most arrived with Cromwell, even if there was a tendency, beginning with the Restoration, to draw a discreet veil over this. For example, according to Burke's Irish Landed Gentry of 1904, Robert Orpen turns up without explanation in Killorglin in 1661. Some generations later, the Rev Thomas Orpen, rector in Kerry in the 1770s, was grandfather of Sophia Orpen, who as Mrs Ellard in Co Limerick was my great-great-grandmother. Rev Orpen was the great-great-grandfather of William Orpen. The bare couple of lines on the painter in Burke's 1904 edition expands to a nine-line place of honour in Burke's Irish Families by 1976. The Orpen name continues in a Dublin firm of solicitors.
Orpen provides an altogether different take from the leading lights of the literary renaissance. Although liking and identifying with Ireland, his interest and preference was for Ireland and Britain to live in harmony. He admired Parnell, and criticised both countries for maltreating him, and painted Michael Davitt. He understood the Howth gun-running. He trained many young Irish artists, including Seán Keating, artistic interpreter of the revolutionary era.
But Orpen had found a rewarding living in London, and became a British war artist, painting a memorable picture of the peace treaty in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. He identified strongly, even indignantly, with the soldiers in the trenches.
Post-1918, he felt it unsafe to return to Ireland, even though he received a cheerful letter from a pupil, Grace Gifford, Joseph Plunkett's wife, in Kilmainham Jail during the Civil War. A man with a wicked sense of humour, seen in the accompanying Illustrated Letters exhibition in the Print Gallery, Orpen boldly submitted a signed receipt to the War Office in 1921 with his signature, citing as witnesses E de Valera and M Collins.
The exhibition contains the full range of his works, including group scenes, portraits, landscapes (mainly Howth), allegorical pictures like The Well of the Saints of an Ireland poised on the threshold of a new era, and his work as a war artist.
His private life was complicated. He had a striking fiancée, Emily Scobel, a remarkably good-looking wife Grace, many private models, a society mistress Mrs St George and a French mistress. He could afford to indulge himself, but died in his early 50s.
Like many who lived and worked in Britain and Ireland, Orpen is best remembered here. Just as women were not after all to be divided as Lady Windermere originally thought into "good women" and "bad women", so it was possible for an Irish artist also to have been a British artist. Exclusive and possessive territorial claims, like those of Don José driven crazy by the rejection of Carmen, often end in tragedy. Wider shared ownership in the cultural sphere is still consistent with legitimate national pride.