Sir William Orpen R.A., R.H.A.

Dublin, Royal Hibernian Academy, 84^th Exhibition, 1913, no.38;
Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland, Temporary Loan Exhibition, 2000 – 2008.

Ever eclectic, Orpen began to appeal to the great traditions of eighteenth century portraiture in the years leading up to the Great War. Through the prism of Reynolds and Gainsborough he would look back to Holbein and Van Dyck in earlier centuries – masters who brought extraordinary richness to his practice. At the same time, these visual sources were given a contemporary Irish inflection. Nowhere is this is more evident than in the portrait of Noll; son of Oliver St John Gogarty, where gesture and location are characteristically Irish.

Commissioned by his father, Oliver St John Gogarty, following his son's recovery from an operation  for appendicitis, it shows the six and a half year old Oliver 'Noll' Duane Odysseus Gogarty standing on the dunes at Portmarnock Strand near Howth Head where Orpen and his family took annual holidays between 1909 and 1914, and where the young Gogarty played on occasion with Orpen's girls, Mary and Kit. Oliver St John Gogarty and Orpen had become good friends by 1910, by which time the former, having trained as a surgeon, was already a familiar figure in Dublin's cultural scene. Known principally today as the model for 'plump stately Buck Mulligan', it was he who shared the Martello Tower at Sandycove with James Joyce in 1904, described at the beginning of Ulysses (see Ulick O'Connor, Oliver St John Gogarty, Jonathan Cape, London, 1964, for further information).  His own 'Sackville Street' trilogy of novels describing Dublin in the early years of the century was published between 1936 and 1954. Around 1910 however, he used his 'tin lizzie' to ferry Orpen to 'liquid lunches' in the countryside around Dublin and in 1912 Orpen painted his portrait on two occasions (fig. 1).

Noll Gogarty (1907-1999) thus had an interesting childhood, rubbing shoulders with literary friends of his father like William Butler Yeats, George Russell (AE) and Edward Dunsany.  In addition to having been painted by Orpen, he liked to recall that his first visit to the cinema was with Augustus John. He was educated in England at Downside School, Bath and Christchurch Oxford where he studied law. Returning to Ireland, he was called to the Bar in 1931, practising on the Midland Circuit. In 1948 he took silk, and practised in the High Court for over forty years. He was also his father's literary executor and Inaugural President of the Oliver St John Gogarty Society. 

However, it was Portmarnock Strand that brought Noll into contact with the Orpen girls – particularly Kit, who was the same age. In a previously unpublished poem Gogarty senior commited one such occasion to verse. A trip out to Portmanock Strand on Kit's sixth birthday, 6^th September 1912, and, written on 26^th November 1912, in which Noll appears in the closing lines, may have been the immediate inspiration behind the composition:

Tell me are you are feeling fit
                                                Kit?
Capering 'twixt six and seven
Like an imp let loose in Heaven.
                                                Sit,
And keep still a minute, Kit!
And I'll show to make you laugh
Summer's cinematograph

First, a lawn beside the sea;
Then a journey out for tea
In a coloured motor-car
On a road that went too far
Past an old, deserted mill –
Don't remember? Mummy will.
(My ignoring her direction
Then, may aid her recollection).

Here's Portmarnock! Here we are!
Take your clothes off for the sea.
Quick! Make haste! You mustn't dally.
Are you coming humming Ally?
See the sunlight on the spray!
Go it Kitty, that's the way:
Artist Orpen's younger daughter
Jumping in the jumping water!
Drowning, dipping up, surviving –
Who has ever seen such living!
Dipping, tripping up and skipping!
Wonderful the way you spit
Out the pouring water Kit!
Blest if I could manage it!

Next, a lull without cessation –
We must find the Coastguard Station,
If your Mummy won't despise it:
Tea, and talk to appetise it.
Noll, you must not tell such whackers:
Give back Kitty Orpen's crackers.

While this circumstantial evidence contributes greatly to our understanding of the present picture, it does not explain its visual significance, as a full-length portrait of a child, standing near an empty beach, and set against a gloomy, storm-filled sky. It is possible that Orpen's memory of the boy who appropriated 'Kitty Orpen's crackers' and then went on to 'tell such wackers', was precocious and stood his ground in exactly the manner in which he is represented. However, the painter may also have thought of other celebrated portraits. It is possible for instance that Sir Joshua Reynolds' playful Portrait of Master Crewe as Henry VIII (c. 1775 fig. 2) came to mind as he considered the young Noll in his Dublin studio in January 1913. Horace Walpole commented on Reynolds' reduction of Holbein's original to 'boyish jollity' and it seems not unlikely that Orpen was looking for a similar impishness – dressing his subject in cut-down furs.

Noll nonchalantly confronts the spectator, with one hand in his pocket, and the other touching his thick woollen cap. Reynolds' 1748 Self Portrait (National Portrait Gallery, London) may also have been in Orpen's mind at this point, although he could equally have been aware of William Collins's Rustic Civility (1833, Victoria and Albert Museum, London), in which an urchin raises his hand to his forelock. Perhaps this tattered figure, or Thomas Gainsborough's full-length Cottage Girl (fig.3, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin) resonated in Orpen's psyche as earlier English equivalents of Dublin's starving children.  His vision of Ireland's future needed the qualities of the urchin as well as the irreverant play-acting of Master Crewe. Noll could, in this case, be about to doff his cap with suitably Irish theatricality.

It is instructive to compare the portrait of Noll with Orpen's treatment of Biddy, the nine year old elder daughter in The Vere Foster Family- Portrait Group, 1907  (fig. 4, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin), in which a more privileged Ireland of the Ascendency is depicted. The girl is obviously bound to the old order of distinguished parentage, crumbling country houses and sporting trophies. Noll by contrast represented something different. An Ireland of bright children upon whom the future rested.

The Orpen Research Project