Sir William Orpen, R.W.S., N.E.A.C., R.A., R.H.A.

Gifted by the Funduklian family in the late 1970s to Bedales School;
Their Sale, Sotheby’s, London, 19 May 1982, lot 108;
Richard Green, London;
Private collection

Original canvas. There are a few very minor spots of staining near the figure's left knee otherwise the work appears in very good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals a small diagonal line of retouching approx. 3cm long in the upper left corner above the figure's head. This appears to relate to a small repaired tear, only very faintly visible to the naked eye upon close inspection. Elsewhere ultraviolet light reveals a minor fleck in the woman's hair and some minor flecks to her left forearm, belly and inner right thigh, to her right hand and to the black handbag. Held in an impressive gilt plaster frame with a canvas inset, in good condition and ready to hang.
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By the winter of 1921 Major William Orpen had returned belatedly to civilian life. The Official War Artist had commissions to complete, but the flurry of activity, captured on newsreel, that accompanied the Peace Conference and followed his service on the Western Front, had come to an end. The procession of frock-coated politicians - ‘frocks’ he called them – who proceeded from the Quai d’Orsay to the signing of the treaty at Versailles, passing through his studio en route, had dispersed, but tensions remained (for his war service see Robert Upstone intro. in William Orpen, An Onlooker in France, 2008). For the exhausted artist, Paris, its Majestic and Astoria hotels, its cinemas, its hard-drinking press men and ease of access to his model/mistress, Yvonne Aubicq, provided respite. Yvonne, known as ‘Eve’, had travelled to the city with him and in the next couple of years was his constant companion. When he ordered up a new gleaming Rolls Royce and employed a chauffeur they drove to Dieppe together – a town he had painted when he first arrived in France as a war artist. But at the end of 1921, while the war demons were not yet silenced, he wandered the galleries of the Louvre seeking inspiration for three important nude paintings of Yvonne.

Orpen’s biographer, Bruce Arnold rightly stresses that the pictures were intended to re-charge his batteries after months of ‘official’ portrait painting. They would also re-establish his presence as one of the dominant personalities of the New English Art Club.¹ Two - Early Morning and The Disappointing Letter - were completed in time for the club’s spring exhibition in 1922, where they were accompanied by Amiens 1914, sometimes known as The Rape (figs. 1-3).  

His new project, as he reported to William Rothenstein six months earlier, was ‘the last word in impossibility’,  

I struggle and struggle and the things get worse and worse – I spent the afternoon in the Louvre looking at nudes and there are none in the least like a woman – Rembrandt’s seated one is of course a marvel – but it’s not like a woman – Manet’s nude after all is a poor show – as a woman – and Courbet’s one in Louvre is a shocker – though I remember seeing photographs of some nude women of his a long time ago which looked wonderful.

And he concludes ‘forgive me for writing all this stuff – I’ll have a drink and forget it’ (William Rothenstein, Men and Memories, Vol.II, 1932, p.376). Clearly Orpen felt out of sympathy with the art of the past, but he may have absorbed more than he was aware of. Rembrandt’s Bathsheba at her bath, 1654, was indeed ‘a marvel’ and at close quarters, Manet’s Olympia, 1865, yielded secrets of technique that he had long admired.² But these great visual landmarks from his past, along with Courbet’s Les Baigneuses, 1853, had momentarily lost their appeal and while we might look for evidence of struggle in the 1921 series, there is little sign of it – not at least in the present Nude Girl Reading. Indeed, whatever we may conclude on his professed doubts, there is the sense in the single figure nudes, that his superb visual shorthand was precisely suited to this elemental subject matter.

And in the search for precedents elsewhere we ought not to forget Orpen’s own éducation sentimentale in The English Nude, 1900 (Mildura Art Centre, Australia) and The Spanish Woman, 1905 (Leeds Museums and Galleries), homages to Dutch and Spanish art that marked separate chapters in the development of his style. Other nudes followed, culminating perhaps in the formidable Nude Pattern, The Holy Well, (fig.4) in which nakedness leads to spiritual cleansing and empowerment. This was his last major statement, dispatched to the New English at that pivotal point when his romantic ‘western world’ was forsaken for the Western Front. Nude Girl Reading takes up the pose from one of the figures in this great canvas and tightens it. 

While Orpen’s portraits in the current Royal Academy were politely praised, the three NEAC pictures sent critics reaching for more extravagant plaudits in 1922.³ ‘Sureness of touch’, ‘freedom of handling’ and ‘ease of line’ were among the phrases used. While some worried over the ‘sentimentalist’ tone of the first two, it was dispelled by the ‘grim reminder of the war’ in the third. In the latter bedroom scene the nude is no longer ‘nude’ and her violation by a German soldier symbolizes that visited on Belgium and Northern France in the Great War (Hull Daily Mail, 9 June 1922, p.4; Yorkshire Post, 7 June 1922, p.9). Amiens 1914 has long been compared with Edgar Degas’s Le Viol, 1868 (Philadelphia Museum of Art, McIlhenny Collection), and were the connection with the French master to be confirmed in the winter of 1921-2, it would elucidate the two other single figure NEAC nudes – but particularly, the present, unexhibited example, the most Degas-iste of the three.⁴ Like Degas, Orpen looks down on the figure, en déshabillé. The French master liked to confide in friends that his was a ‘keyhole’ vision; in Nude Girl Reading, Orpen embraces the same intimacy.

His model for these pictures was Yvonne Aubicq, the daughter of the Mayor of Lille. They met while Orpen was undergoing treatment at the military hospital in Amiens during the winter of 1917-18, where she was acting as a nurse. During his recovery, having read stories of the recent execution by the French, of Mata Hari, an alleged German spy, he painted her on two occasions as ‘The Spy’. Simona Pakenham, who met Yvonne in the twenties, recalled the ‘mild sensation’ caused by these canvases, the most dramatic of which showed her with ‘wild’ hair, ‘the ragged remains of clothing clutched around her naked shoulders’ (Simona Pakenham, Pigtails and Pernod, 1961, p.155).  Orpen was, at this point, increasingly turning to allegory and the rather romantic result, immediately fulfilled its purpose, unexpectedly attracting the attention of the military censor, Lt-Colonel A.N. Lee. As is frequently recounted, Orpen at first attempted to blague his way out of the problem in interview, but finding himself facing court martial, he was returned to London where charges were only dropped after the intervention of Lord Beaverbrook and the offending pictures were re-titled The Refugee (fig.5).

Orpen remained in London from March 1918 to the beginning of July when in the wake of a highly successful exhibition of his war paintings at Agnew’s, he returned to the Western Front. Contact with Yvonne was renewed and she is likely to have accompanied him when, after the Armistice, he was dispatched to Paris to paint the sequence of portraits that form the most comprehensive record of the peace negotiations – a process that continued after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919.⁵ It was as his war commissions were winding down towards the end of 1921 that Orpen’s thoughts returned to war allegory in Amiens 1914 – The Rape, with Yvonne posing as the naked girl.

Yvonne remained by Orpen’s side during most of the decade, even after their affair had cooled and she had taken up with William Charles Frederick Grover-Williams (1903-1945), his chauffeur. Pakenham recalled her sense of fun, ‘pale gold hair’, ‘English schoolgirl’ style, and the fact that she wore no make-up (Pakenham, 1961, pp.155-7). At the time of her marriage to Grover-Williams in November 1929, he had a successful career as a racing driver, winning the French, Belgian and Monaco Grand Prix. During the Second World War, he joined the Special Operations Executive and Yvonne and he ran a resistance cell until his capture in 1943. Although he died at Sachsenhausen concentration in 1945, there are unconfirmed reports that he actually survived the war and returned to live in secret with Yvonne at Evreux under the assumed named of ‘Georges Tambal’. Yvonne, by this stage was a successful breeder of Highland Terriers and a judge at Crufts. She died in 1973.

The ‘Yvonne’ nudes of 1921 were painted in the studio of Russell Greeley (1878-1956), a Boston ‘Brahmin’, whose forebears had founded the New York Tribune. He was an exact contemporary of Orpen’s, with a modest reputation as a portrait painter. In 1906 Greely had taken up residence in Paris and by the time Orpen met him, was moving in avant-garde circles that by the mid-twenties included Picasso, van Dongen, Man Ray, Tristan Tzara, de Segonzac, and the English painter, Nina Hamnett.⁶ We might assume that the chair in the present picture and props in the other Orpen nudes, came from Greeley’s opulent studio. To these, Yvonne’s discarded clothing and her smouldering cigarette add the frisson of authenticity – and indeed, modernity.

Of the three single figure nudes, the present comes closest to Amiens 1914 in that it shows the disarray of the model’s clothes, her wrinkled white stocking and the open handbag from which she has taken the cigarette. Her left hand caresses her breast as she reads intently. Orpen observes the tension of limbs, the luminous touches in tummy and thigh, and the blush of fingers and face. The head, tilted towards the viewer is captured with an economy few could match. The pose, for all its complexity, is natural and Orpen looks down at her in a warm caress. If he was hesitant before the masters, in Greeley’s studio, none of it shows.

[1] Bruce Arnold, William Orpen, Mirror to an Age, 1981, (Jonathan Cape), pp. 383-389. In the previous year Orpen was represented at the club by a single work, the magisterial Poet (Private Collection), a painting begun prior to his service on the Western Front.

[2] During his student years Orpen had made his first visit to the Louvre and in 1899 he had the opportunity to absorb the work of Rembrandt at the Royal Academy Winter Exhibition. A year earlier he would have seen two important early works by Manet at the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers and in 1904 had advised Hugh Lane on the acquisition of works by Manet at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in Paris, His Homage to Manet, (Manchester City Art Galleries) was of course shown at the New English Art Club in 1909. 

[3] Orpen’s Academy portraits in 1922 typified the many which would follow during the decade – they included those of Sir Charles Parsons, the Newcastle Engineer, Lord Bearsted, the banker and Sir Charles Villiers, Professor of Music at Cambridge University.

[4] Orpen arrived in Paris around the time of the third and fourth Degas studio sales at the Georges Petit Gallery in April 1919. Taken with the first two sales in May of the previous year, these launched a total of 1523 works into the market, many of which were paintings, pastels and drawing of nudes. For a discussion of Amiens 1914, see Autumn Anthology, 1983 (exhibition catalogue, Pyms Gallery, London), no 25. 

[5] Further portraits of Yvonne were painted in 1919, this time posing as a nun. Terms of the Versailles Treaty were not universally agreed. The US Senate at first refused to ratify it, and there was widespread feeling in France that the terms were too lenient – precipitating the fall of Clemenceau’s administration – a drama played out during Orpen’s stay in Paris.  

[6] Kenneth Wayne, Impressions of the Riviera, Monet, Renoir, Matisse and their Contemporaries, 1998 (exhibition catalogue, Portland Museum of Art, Maine), p. 64; see also John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol III, The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, (Pimlico), pp. 313-5. In 1925 Greeley purchased the Château de Clavary near Grasse, where he lived with François de Gouy d’Arcy. Here he commissioned a mosaic from Picasso. The house was later owned by Peter Wilson, the renowned Sotheby’s chairman in the 1960s.  

Professor Kenneth McConkey