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

The Artist

Miss Cara Copland

Gifted by the above to Beaverbrook Art Gallery

Paul George Konody and Sidney Dark, Sir William Orpen: Artist and Man, Seeley Service and Co., Ltd., London, 1932, p. 276 (titled Palm Sunday)

Orpen’s recourse to Biblical subject matter at the end of his life after years of dissipation seems intelligible. Marked indelibly by his struggle to make sense of experiences on the Western Front, he pedalled furiously on the ‘golden treadmill’ of portrait commissions in the 1920s to obliterate the sights he had seen in the trenches. His choice of subject matter was occasioned more by available visual sources than by any preordained programme and a moving twelfth century carving at Bode Museum, Berlin supplied the inspiration for Christ in two extant versions of Palm Sunday.

Fig 1      Anon, Christus ale Eseltreiber, mitgeführt bei Prozessionen am Palmsonntag, 12^th century, (the donkey is a pre-1930 addition), Bode Museum, Berlin.

What was Orpen trying to do in these paintings? His Jesus on a donkey set against a brilliant blue sky at first looks like an illustration from a children’s picture book or Sunday school flannel-graph. But here, there are no crowds crying ‘Hosanna!’, no waving palm fronds – only a single penitent seeking absolution and transcribed from earlier drawings used in the so-called ‘Irish Trilogy’ fifteen years before.

It appears that this version of Palm Sunday was painted for Miss Cara Copland, who befriended the artist in his final months. 

Kenneth McConkey