Sir William Orpen was part of a generation of artists born in the 1870s - among whom were William Nicholson and Augustus John - whose careers started as the nineteenth century closed and the twentieth began. These painters differed from their Victorian predecessors in style and attitude, and in many ways they were modern men, but they lived through an extraordinary period of transition in culture and political life which has only been fully reassessed in the past ten years. Orpen himself was no stranger to controversy, but he remained part of the Establishment and of a certain raffish artistic milieu located in Chelsea and the West End, whereas the artists of the nascent Modern Movement had a quite different set of social co-ordinates.

Sir William Orpen was part of a generation of artists born in the 1870s - among whom were William Nicholson and Augustus John - whose careers started as the nineteenth century closed and the twentieth began. These painters differed from their Victorian predecessors in style and attitude, and in many ways they were modern men, but they lived through an extraordinary period of transition in culture and political life which has only been fully reassessed in the past ten years. Orpen himself was no stranger to controversy, but he remained part of the Establishment and of a certain raffish artistic milieu located in Chelsea and the West End, whereas the artists of the nascent Modern Movement had a quite different set of social co-ordinates.

Foreword

Love and Beauty in an Age of Extremes

Robert Upstone

Orpen,Ibsen and the Plays within the Play

David Fraser Jenkins

Orpen and the New Ireland

Professor R.F.Foster

List of exhibited works

Acknowledegments

Lenders