Studio: international art (62.1914)

A Notable Portrait by Mr. William Orpen, A.R.A.

ANOTABLE PORTRAIT BY MR.
WILLIAM ORPEN, A.R.A.

The style of portrait exemplified in Mr.
William Orpen's beautiful picture of the Countess
of Crawford and Balcarres, reproduced in colour on
the opposite page by special permission of Lord
Crawford, is one too seldom adopted nowadays.
We can find no reason why this charming way of
presenting the sitter should not enjoy a revival.
But it is not difficult to see why it is out of fashion
in these days. It does not advertise, it does not
scream in an exhibition. There are those who
have convinced themselves that they must scream
to arrest attention in a modern exhibition. To go
into some modern picture galleries is an experience
not unlike that of entering a parrot-house.

It is impossible to believe that the highest interest
of the art of portraiture can be served in the above
circumstances. For one thing portraits are most
often destined for the quiet of a library or morning-
room. With such surroundings they should be in
some agreement. And there is a tradition which
cannot wisely be put aside in this ; the old tradition
of leading up to the presentment of the sitter
through an appeal to sentiment in the composition,
and to our sense of decoration.

The conditions of a large exhibition are certainly
unpromising for the survival of the quality that
counts most in portraiture, that of intimacy. The
relation of environment to character must be appre-
ciated by the artist of the portrait interior-piece.
Environment, after all, is the outside wrap of the
soul; personality irradiates beyond clothes to
accessories; everything in a person's home ex-
presses them—if it is really a home and not a
family hotel.

Appreciation of the mental atmosphere of places
is a special gift, not necessarily allied with the
genius of painting, and this fact puts a limit to
successful examples of the portrait interior-piece.
But it is in successful painting of the kind that we
may look for the equivalent of the art of the modern
novel, with its genius for interior genre. This type
of art would appear to be peculiarly expressive of
the circumstances of modern life, in which the
demand for portraits is less often made by princes
than by ordinary people. Just when our modern
portrait-painters might have appreciated the latter
fact and made the most of it, " post-impressionism "
has led them away. If they return in time the door
will still be open, and the easel keeping it ajar is that
of Mr. Orpen, legitimate successor to Peter de Hooch
and Alfred Stevens. It was a happy moment when
LXII. No. 255.—July 1914

he thought of combining his commissions for
portraits with a class of picture which he composes
so naturally.

The portrait interior-piece allows the artist to in-
troduce an agreeable variety of colour in the acces-
sories and lends itself to the exquisitely finished
style of the Dutch, the sensitive atmospheric loose-
ness of impressionism, or to the insistence upon
pattern in line and colour which is a characteristic
of so many modern pictures. The test of complete
success of course in portraiture of this type is
in subordinating the accessories to the sitter,
so that nothing competes with the figure of the
sitter in claiming our first interest. This problem
solves itself in the case of an artist with an instinct
as fine as Mr. Orpen's for what is relevant to the-
sitter. Instead of competing with the sitter,,
accessories can be made to assist the expression of
his personality, reflecting his tastes and the world in
which he moves.

There can be no doubt that the type of portrait
we are describing will have a fascination for posterity
which no other kind of portrait can hope to possess.
The judgment of a portrait simply as portraiture and
not from the point of view of the interest of
the composition is a thing to be given by itself.
From that point of view of course there are simple
representations' of a face or single figure by
Rembrandt or Hals with which nothing can be
ranked. But where everything else is of equal
merit the picture which is most happily and
pictorially composed has the greater interest. It is
with unusual pleasure that we discover, in eighteenth-
century collections, pieces by Zoffany which have
been painted with no more surety of touch than works
by his contemporaries but which by their art in sug-
gesting the circumstances of life of the time possess
a peculiar power of appealing to the imagination.
These are delightful items in any collection, and
where this sort of thing is united to exquisite craft
we have those gems of the cabinet which are
the delight of every real connoisseur.

Perhaps the ideals of to-day are a little antagonistic
to the survival of qualities which may be termed
"precious" in a picture, but these qualities have been
so long out of fashion that it would not be unreason-
able to look for their return ; and in any case the
form of the small interior portrait picture in its
invitation to invention and fancy might, without any
return to exhausted conventions, bring about a
revival of that sense of what is due to the spectator
of a picture, beyond a mere sketch of first ideas,
which we feel to be wanting in so very many artists
at the present time.

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