Art: Billy Orps

After long illness, Death came to Sir William Oroen last week. Britain and the world lost a great painter.

Sir William Orpen, K. B. E., R. A. was born in Stillorgan, County Dublin, 52 years ago. He was an incredible little man who looked like a Gaelic gnome, used to smoke 70 cigarets a day, eat four meals, sleep twelve hours and walk 15 miles. To an enormous circle of acquaintances he was known quite simply as Billy Orps. His career started in 1890 when he won a L2Q scholarship at the age of 12 and began to study painting at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. He went to London and studied at the Slade School when that dusty institute contained such promising pupils as Augustus John, Sir John Lavery, William Rothenstein. Billy Orps did not have to wait long for recognition. His humor, the firmness of his line, above all his brilliant use of color attracted inter national attention. Very soon he had more portrait com missions than he could handle. Tycoons besieged his studio. One New York gallery offered him $5,000,000 to come to New York and do a series of 300 portraits. Billy Orps turned it down. He had all the portraits he could possibly do right in London at $10,000 apiece. Otto Hermann Kahn, Andrew William Mellon, William Wallace Atterbury are among the U. S. businessmen who traveled to London to be limned by the little Irishman. During the War, British authorities pinned the gold crowns of a major on his shoulders, clapped a tin helmet on his head and sent him to the front to do sketches of the troops and large oil portraits of the generals. It was this series of War pictures that won him his knighthood in 1918. But beside the successful portrait painter there was another Billy Orpen. His soul revolted frequently at painting the smug faces of Success. He never lost his fondness for Gypsies and the color of the West of Ireland. He made brilliant little landscapes. He would sneak away from his job at the Versailles Peace Conference to paint the honey-bearded chef of the Hotel Chatham in Paris. He told President Wilson, General Pershing, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson what he thought of them and earned the subsidiary nickname of “The Wasp.” When he could not stand the idea of drawing another frock coat, he would paint himself again, accenting his pixie face, dressing himself in outlandish costumes. There exist striking self-portraits of Billy Orps in a succession of funny hats, in racing silks as a jockey, as a major in his muffler and trench helmet, as a wildfowler, as a painter with a dustcloth wrapped round his head, in his bathrobe.

Though he was never slovenly in his drawing he was artist enough to let his style change with the changes in modern life. In May he sent to the Royal Academy a highly formalized picture of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. The British press received it with the angry snorts generally reserved for the opera of Sculptor Jacob Epstein. Apparently it meant a great deal to Billy Orps. His health broke down, he spent most of the summer in a nursing home. Recently he was discharged and attempted to get on with his painting. Last week came the final relapse.