Sir William Orpen, RA RHA (1876-1931) Old John's Cottage, C...

Estimate

€300,000 - €500,000

Sir William Orpen, RA RHA (1876-1931) Old John's Cottage, Connemara Oil on canvas, 91.5 x 96.5cm (36 x 38'') Signed and dated 1908 Painting of Seán & Máire Geoghegan in Co. Mayo after their daughter’s Farewell Party - known as an American Wake because the parents knew it was the last time they would ever see their child. Provenance: Mrs Evelyn St George, 1908, who purchased it for £200; A. St George & B. Duke, September 1989 to Pym's Gallery, London; Collection Vincent and Jacqueline O’Brien, Ireland 1971, thence by descent. Exhibited: Dublin, Royal Hibernian Academy, A free Spirit, Irish Art, 1860-1960, 1990, no.31; Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland, on loan from 2017 to 2024. Literature: Sir William Orpen RA, Stories of Old Ireland and Myself, 1924 (Williams and Northgate), p. 34 (illus); PG Konody & Sidney Dark, Sir William Orpen, 1932(Seeley Service & Co. Ltd), p. 277 listed as 'uncertain date'; Bruce Arnold, Orpen Mirror to an Age, 1981 (Jonathan Cape), 1981, p. 239; Kenneth McConkey, A Free Spirit, Irish Art, 1860-1960, 1990 (Antique Collectors' Club in association with Pyms Gallery, London), pp., 132-2 (illus) In 1907 when William Orpen was painting his first portrait of Gardenia St George at Screebe Lodge in Maam Cross, county Mayo, he visited the humbler abode of Seán and Máire Geoghegan - a cabin the interior of which became the setting for Old John’s Cottage, Connemara. The custodians of this ancient hearth, mute and motionless, project an iconic presence.[1] Their passivity carries the grief that came with the departure of their granddaughter for New York where she would enter domestic service and never be seen again. The farewell was marked in what was described as an ‘American Wake’. The contrast between what he referred to as the ‘poorer classes’ pictured here, and the ‘Ascendancy’ circle in Louth where he would shortly paint the Vere Foster Family, (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin) could not be greater.[2] Up to this point Orpen had mythologised the Dublin poor as a collection of ragged mountebanks plying their trade on the Quays, but now he confronted the blank resignation of those for whom there was no escape from life’s hard landscape. Travellers to this terrain, before and after Orpen’s depiction of two typical inhabitants, lifted their eyes to the hills and marvelled at its rugged beauty, while recognising that lands west of the Shannon, where Cromwell corralled the native Irish, was a place of desolation and destitution. Ravaged by poverty, famine and the ‘Land Wars’ of the 1880s, cabins like that in the present painting had been laid waste during the harsh evictions of recent memory. The cottage, Orpen tells us, was located on a bog, about nine miles from his patron’s lodge, and half a mile from the road, with no easy access. On the night of the wake, he arrived at 10 o’clock to find, ‘the grandmother and grandfather sat in their places on each side of the fire, and benches were ranged round the walls, on which the couples were seated.’ Plied with hot tea and poteen, silence reigned until ‘the music man would play some sad air and a few of the couples … would … dance very slowly in a weary, bored sort of way.’ Orpen stayed for four hours, during which time not a word was spoken between those present, before he decamped into the pouring rain. The young emigrant, who had been ‘ignored’ all evening then caught up with him to help him find a safe way to the road, and the following morning he presented her with a photograph of the painting. [3] If the painter’s narrative is to be accepted, it seems likely that the work, begun in 1907, remained at the Maam Cross lodge until the following year, when events surrounding the wake and the gift of the photograph must have occurred. Orpen recorded the progress of the present work in a letter to his wife, Grace, giving her a swift pen drawing of the ensemble in which the roof was too high and the room too large. Nevertheless, he concluded ‘I think it is going well’ (fig 1). In the autumn of 1908, Old John’s Cottage, Connemara was purchased for £200 by Gardenia’s mother, Mrs St George.[4] Clearly the work’s social historical significance is immense. Its authenticity breaks through the Yeatsian ‘motley’ of fairies, myth and legend, and stands with JM Synge in the presentation of a people whose beliefs, customs and culture was regarded as a unique survival.[5] Orpen’s sympathies were not with Horace Plunkett and the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, any more than he approved of ‘intellectuals’ of the George Russell (AE) stripe.[6] At heart he was an ‘eye’ – an observer in whose neutrality before the ancient hearth, lay his power. In visual terms Old John’s Cottage, Connemara provides a necessary corrective to the work of Erskine Nicol, James Brennan and Howard Helmick, who established an ‘Irish’ subgenre of peasant interiors in exhibitions throughout Britain and Ireland fifty years earlier. But where these artists looked for diverting subjects, Orpen adopts a different tradition, and one that can ultimately be traced to French Naturalism of the 1880s. Its impact upon painters in the early days of the New English Art Club and the Slade School of Fine Art, where he would complete his training and become a new generation star exhibitor, was profound.[7] The likes of George Clausen and James Guthrie, had looked for documentary accuracy in their depictions of fieldworkers, often posing them ‘as they live’, in portrait mode, and with no condescension or concession to narrative. This was the generation of Walter Osborne whose Galway expedition of 1892 led to an oil sketch that provides evidence of a similar cottage encounter (fig 2). The moment for such objectivity had never passed, but at the opening of the twentieth century, addressing a people that even by the 1930s was considered to have been ‘locked away for centuries by geography and poverty’, it was becoming both necessary, and urgent. The case would be taken up by Orpen’s pupils, Seán Keating, Charles Lamb and others, in an effort to reveal a prelapsarian world, west of Galway, in which ‘Progress – whatever we mean by it – has broken in vain against grey walls’. Recognising this, Old John’s Cottage, Connemara avoids the obvious later valorisation of the Gael in the works such as Keating’s Aran Fisherman and his Wife, 1916 (Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin) and Lamb’s Quaint Couple, 1930 (Crawford Art Gallery, Cork), while Paul Henry’s early Achill turf cutters and potato diggers were, in 1908, yet to come. How then do we approach Orpen’s seminal encounter in a cottage in Connemara How does the present painting play against his own heroic self-projection as a ‘man of the west’, clad in an Aran bonnet, leather jerkin and ‘crois’ or woollen sash tied at the waste (fig 3) In Orpen’s Connemara cabin, a stage is set for himself and others to play their parts. Its origins, so far as he – ‘Orpsieboy’ - suburban Dubliner - exiled in London - was concerned, lay in the precision with which the poses of the elderly couple,living on the earthen floor of a barren bog, were rendered. The man’s reverie and the woman’s grave reticence are theirs alone. They were as he found them, and would be still, if he was alive and went back today. Like Grant Wood’s American Gothic, 1930 (Art Institute of Chicago), they are de trop, but at the same time, essential. Kenneth McConkey, November, 2024 [1] Information giving the title of the picture is derived from a letter to Grace, the artist’s wife, quoted in Bruce Arnold, Orpen Mirror to an Age, 1981 (Jonathan Cape), p.239. [2] Sir William Orpen RA, Stories of Old Ireland and Myself, 1924 (Williams and Northgate), p.32; see also Arnold, 1981, p.239. [3] A story confirmed in Arnold 1981. [4] Orpen 1924, p. 36. The picture’s reservation to Mrs St George may also explain its absence rom the artist’s Studio Book. It appears however in Cara Copeland’s handwritten Li