Details
- Object type
painting
- Title
A Saint of the Poor
- Artist/Maker
- Culture/School
Irish
- Date
circa 1905
- Materials
oil on canvas
- Dimensions
unframed: 686 mm x 545 mm
- Description
-
An older man, with ragged clothes and bare chest, looks sorrowfully down, hands clasped in front of him. His face, hands and chest are dramatically lit against a dark background. Paint is laid on thickly with a palette knife, enhancing the rugged realism of the image. The model was a Mr Green, an Irishman whom the artist knew from Chelsea. Orpen’s biographer Bruce Arnold described Green as having ‘a gnarled, careworn face, a long nose, a moustache and short, almost cropped, hair.’ He also appears in Orpen’s Window of a London Street (1901), St Patrick (1905; The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent) and The Flycatcher, or The Old Coster (1905; private collection).
Born in Stillorgan, County Dublin, William Orpen was a fashionable and technically accomplished portraitist and painter of figurative subjects. He studied painting at Dublin Metropolitan School of Art from 1890 to 1897 and at the Slade School of Art in London from 1897 to 1899. From 1902 he ran a private teaching studio, Chelsea Art School, with his friend Augustus John. Although he made his name as a portrait painter to the wealthy, Orpen painted many pictures of the urban poor, particularly before World War I. This painting, with its theatric pose and lighting, was modelled on the work of 17th-century Baroque masters, such as Caravaggio, Ribera and Velázquez, who painted older men (saints, penitents and vagabonds), with great detail and realism in their religious and genre paintings. A Saint of the Poor, a modern day ascetic or holy man, was exhibited at the New English Art Club in 1905.
- Credit Line/Donor
Presented by the Trustees of the Hamilton Bequest, 1938
- ID Number
2096
- Location
In storage