William Orpen, Irish, 1878-1931
Title: The Dead Ptarmigan (a Self-Portrait)
Date: c.1909
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions:
100 x 91 cm
Credit Line: Bequeathed, Lady Poe, 1930
Object Number: NGI.945
Exhibition HistoryNew English Art Club, London, 1909
Summer Exhibition, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1910
Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, 1913
Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, 1920
Art Exhibition IXth Olympiade, Amsterdam, 1928
No. 9 Birmingham Exhibition, 1933
World Fair, New York, 1939 William Orpen 1878-1931, A Centenary Exhibition, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 1 November -15 December 1978
Summer Exhibition, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1910
Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, 1913
Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, 1920
Art Exhibition IXth Olympiade, Amsterdam, 1928
No. 9 Birmingham Exhibition, 1933
World Fair, New York, 1939 William Orpen 1878-1931, A Centenary Exhibition, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 1 November -15 December 1978
Label TextThis is one of several self-portraits in which Orpen casts himself as a fanciful heroic or theatrical figure. Here, he appears as a haughty country sportsman, holding aloft the spoils of his activity. Though for the composition, Orpen drew heavily on a Dutch seventeenth-century tradition, he intended this to be a recognisably Irish subject. He wrote to his friend and fellow artist William Rothenstein ‘my picture is not English it’s Irish and we grow ptarmigans in the West’.
