Roy Foster - It would have been impossible for Irish painter William Orpen to support the Easter Rising
Roy Foster wrote: "[William Orpen's] involvement in, and commitment to, the War in Europe... brought some of his greatest work. One of his greatest self-portraits, ‘Ready to Start’, shows him setting out, his face full of foreboding under his steel helmet [See plate nº 6] He painted the blasted landscape of Flanders and Picardy, in unreal, brilliant colours; he showed men wandering shell-shocked through ruined buildings; a stark study called ‘Dead Germans in a Trench’ depicts exactly that. Above all Orpen celebrated the heroism of ordinary soldiers, and despised the decisions of the civilian authorities who sent them to their doom; attitudes which pervaded his paintings of the Versailles Peace Conference, and his depictions of war memorials when the conflict was over. These paintings, liked by the public, were extremely controversial with the authorities who had commissioned them. Orpen’s war paintings constitute an enormous subject, and cannot be dealt with here. But it must be remembered that in his commitment to the war effort, he was like many Irish Protestants of his time; and like them, he felt deeply divided when nationalist Ireland slowly but inexorably turned against the Allied cause. For someone of Orpen’s background, affiliations, ideas, the Easter Rising would have been hard enough to stomach; but when allied to the fact that it was carried out with German aid, at a time when the war was going badly, it would have been impossible for him to support it. The odd thing is how little he commented on Irish affairs as they descended into a maelstrom of violence and bitterness. He was, of course, descending into his own maelstrom. Paradoxically, in the years just before Irish history went into fast-forward mode, he had painted ambitious allegorical canvases trying to express what he thought about it all: and then, nothing." See here: http://www.estudiosirlandeses.org/2005/03/old-ireland-and-himself-william-orpen-and-the-conflicts-of-irish-identity/