William Orpen, an Outsider in France: Painting and Writing World War One
William Orpen (1878-1931) was in 1917 appointed as an official war artist in France. He not only saw the Great War as a call to paint serious subject-matter—enabling him to break away from the constraints of society portraiture in London—but also as an opportunity to write. Orpen was commissioned, along with artists such as Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer and Wyndham Lewis, to paint for the Department of Information. He was the only war artist to keep a written record of his wartime experience, published in 1921 as An Onlooker in France. In his Preface, Orpen rather too modestly states: “This book must not be considered as a serious work on life in France behind the lines, it is merely an attempt to record some certain little incidents that occurred in my own life there.” This art-historical study is a companion to this “attempt”. It examines, within the context of the global crisis that WWI was, and from various theoretical, philosophical and literary angles, his singular and at times provocative work. Orpen set out to provide a textual and visual record of life on the Western Front, as well as behind the lines—of what was supposed to be the “War to End all Wars”. For want of being a “fighting man”, the non-combatant artist-writer determined to fight with his own arms, his pens and brushes.
Caroline Gallois holds the agrégation post-graduate high-level teaching diploma and obtained her Master’s diploma on the London-based Irish painter and writer William Orpen in 2017. She is currently researching, at PhD level, visual and textual representations of place, location and displacement in Orpen’s œuvre within the context of Modernist art and thought.
"Caroline Gallois’s exemplary study of William Orpen, his war memoir An Onlooker in France, and his pictural art, is a more than worthy addition to previous work on the painter, from the point of view of an author whose perspective—much like Orpen’s own—is bicultural Anglo-French (or in Orpen’s case, Hiberno-French). As such there can be no better introduction to this singular artist, whose gusto and taste for practical jokes concealed a darker and more complex vision. In her witty and humane approach to Orpen, Gallois combines specialist knowledge of his pictural art and his writings with fresh art-historical, philosophical and theoretical approaches to the artist. No-one with an interest in First World War painting and writing will want to be without this book."
Adrian Grafe Professor of English, Artois University
Buy This Book
