Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 8th December 2021

54 In the present example, the depth of Orpen’s stylistic concerns reveals itself. As has been pointed out, he had visited Paris and Madrid with Hugh Lane in the autumn of 1904, spending extended periods in the Prado. (3) In Paris he is known to have toured dealers’ emporia, giving lessons in Impressionist painting to Lane and possibly receiving recip- rocal instruction in front of Old Masters, before returning to London with a collection of photographs. Over the winter and throughout the following year, Orpen was working out these experiences in pictures of pauper saints and Old Testament prophets whose poses and ges- tures are drawn from myriad High Renaissance and Baroque sources. (4) It must have seemed to Orpen that there was a secret language of hand movements, derived from religious ritual and seen in popular repro- ductions of works like Leonardo’s St John the Baptist. The saint’s pose, the tilt of the head, is repeated in the present work, while, like the Bap- tist, Orpen’s St Patrick , 1905 (Potteries Museum, Stoke-on-Trent) points heavenward. Gesture, in the pointing forefinger seen in Van Dyck’s cel- ebrated Self-Portrait with Sunflower, c. 1632, had, by the seventeenth century, acquired secular significance and this, like the Leonardo, was a work Orpen could have seen in the real (figs 3&4). (5) Anita’s delicate fingers are of course spread in the present work, as she draws her necklace through them – perhaps indicating ambivalence, or the complexity of the ‘new woman’, making her way in a world of shifting values. Around her shoulders is the scarlet shawl in which Grace Knew- stub, Orpen’s wife, had posed in 1903 and which would reappear in Lot- tie of Paradise Walk, 1905. With all this, is her gaze quizzical, or merely impassive – is she making a point or seeking a reaction? When the present picture passed to the artist’s friend, the Irish pho- tographer, George Charles Beresford, Bartle produced a further anthol- ogy, The Madonna of the Poets, illustrated with popular pictures of the Madonna, and was received into the Catholic Church. Other works of a similar nature followed, along with three children, and in 1922, having honed her language skills in Greek and Russian, she published The Aka- thistos Hymn with the translator, Dr John Christopher. An autodidact of great scholarship, it seems appropriate that Bartle should be represent- ed here by a painter, the depth of whose visual understanding, com- bined with infallible instinct, erudition and great natural ability leaves us with an engaging enigma. Prof. Kenneth McConkey, November 2021 (1) See Viola Meynell, Alice Meynell, A Memoir, 1929 (Jonathan Cape), pp. 212- 221. (2) In 1902, when Bartle’s ‘birthday book’ was published, Everard Meynell was posing for Orpen in pictures such as Interior , c. 1901 (Private Collection) and The Chess Players , c. 1902 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). (3) Bruce Arnold, Orpen, Mirror to an Age, 1981, (Jonathan Cape), pp. 143-5. (4) Kenneth McConkey, ‘Dark Identities – Orpen’s Hispanic Repertory’, British Art Journal, vol VII, no 3, Winter, 2006-7, pp. 62-9. (5) Leonardo da Vinci’s, St John the Baptist , was in the French royal collection until the Revolution of 1789. Van Dyck’s celebrated, Self-Portrait with Sunflower, was lent by the Duke of Westminster to the Royal Academy Winter Exhibition of 1900. It will be noted that, like Anita Bartle, the painter fingers a gold chain as he points Fig 2 William Orpen, Self-Portrait, 1903, in Anita Bartle, This is my Birthday, 1902 (Grant Allen), Hyman Kreitman Archive, Tate Britain Fig 3 Leonardo da Vinci, St John the Baptist , 1513-1516, panel, 69 x 57 cms, Musée du Louvre, Paris Fig 4 Anthony van Dyck, Self-Portrait with Sunflower, 1633, 73 x 60, The Duke of Westminster, Eaton Hall. Cheshire

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