British Staff Officer, 1918


Dead Germans in a Trench, 1917

Both courtesy of: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk 
(Permission granted by e-mail)

Biography

William Orpen was born in 1878 in Stillorgan County, Dublin. He was a pupil at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin and at the Slade School of London. The Play Scene from Hamlet and The Mirror were the two most significant pieces he created during his studies at Slade. However, Orpen’s most famous works are portraits of public figures.  Two of his famous portraits are of Winston Churchill and Lord Derby commissioned by the Army Service Corps in 1916.

The Influences

Orpen was recruited in 1916 by the War Propaganda Bureau (WPB of England) to create pieces that would illicit sympathy for the war. Orpen’s job was to create portraits of leading military figures such as Herbert Plumer, Ferdinand Foch and Hugh Trenchard.

Reality turned bitter, however, when Orpen experienced what the people of the West Front were undergoing.  He encountered disturbing images of war, such as dead men in trenches and other human cruelties. He began to realize that traditional portraits did not exemplify the horrors of the war; therefore, he started to focus instead on the soldiers and the people who were involved in the fighting.

In his painting Dead Germans in a Trench, Orpen depicts two German soldiers, their faces rotting in the open sun. Their hands reach out as if trying to grasp poles that may help them escape from the trench, and their mouths open wide as if screaming horrifically. This painting creates a profound feeling of horror.  So strong is the effect on the audience that one must stop and wonder what the effect was for the artist. Other war paintings by Orpen include Ready to Start and The Signing of the Peace. The artist who was primarily a portrait painter in the beginning had adjusted his view to cover the wide range of the war.