Fig. 1 The present work in situ at The K Club, Co. Kildare

During the 1920s, haunted by his experiences on the Western Front and working at a fever pitch, Orpen was on what John Rothenstein described as a ‘golden treadmill’ from which there was no escape (Modern English Painters, Volume 1, Sickert to Smith, 1952 (Eyre and Spottiswoode), p. 223). Sitters arrived at the studio door in ‘the Boltons’ by the hour, in a seemingly endless queue. Although he never returned to Ireland during these early ‘Free State’ years, the country never left him. In 1924, sentiment welled up in Stories of Old Ireland and Myself (Williams & Northgate), a slim volume recalling his days in Dublin before the Great War and the Easter Rising – a world of light-hearted romantic idealism. The book is likely to have brought him back into contact with a number of old cronies, one of whom was William Sinclair, a dealer and drinking partner who, with his family, had posed for the ‘Fiddler’ group in A Western Wedding 1913 (destroyed). Sinclair, then known as ‘the Boss’, occupied a cottage on Howth Head in those halcyon days, but had moved to Germany in 1922. In 1925, he and Orpen, as surviving letters show, were back in contact – Orpen wishing that they could meet up and renew their friendship.

While there is no record of this taking place, further research may show that the model for A Woman Thinking is a Sinclair relative, perhaps one of their children, now grown-up. It is also probable that the picture’s first owner, Lord Ashfield, a former President of the Board of Trade who brought together disparate companies to form London Transport, saw it in Orpen’s studio while sittings were in progress for his own portrait. The two portraits are bracketed together in the artist’s studio book (National Gallery of Ireland Archives) wherein the present portrait is identified as ‘Miss Sinclair’. Connections to days long past may account for the mood of reverie that pervades the painting. A black felt hat that stretches over abundant but unseen hair of itself suggests that Orpen was revisiting former times when he, Grace, their children, and the Sinclairs were dwellers on Howth.

Abstract thought, conveyed in a pensive pose, was not an unusual subject in the narrative paintings of Orpen’s youth and he had worked his own variation on Rodin’s Thinker in the magisterial Thinker on the Butte de Warlencourt 1918 (Private Collection). Such was the psychological penetration in portraits of Beatrice Elvery, Vera Hone and romantic yearning in Grace’s hilltop wanderings that, as in the portrait of Miss Sinclair, the viewer is entranced in the encounter and enticed into memories of golden days. Her reverie, her sensuality, lips reddened by wild nature as much as lipstick, and the vague suggestion of grey hills under a lowering sky, all have their part to play in this re-creation of a lost domain.

Kenneth McConkey