This large oil painting on canvas (157 x 94.5 cm) of Evelyn St George by her lover, the Irish artist Sir William Orpen is for auction at Sotheby’s London on 14th Nov 2024.
Lot: 8, Estimate: £600,000 – £800,000.
UPDATE: Sold for £690,000.
Text from Sotheby’s Catalogue: –
Provenance: Mrs. Evelyn St. George, and thence by descent until 1991.
Acquired from the above by Pyms Gallery, London, from whom acquired by a Private Collection, New Jersey.
Their Estate Sale, NYE & Co., Bloomfield, 31 July 2024, lot 293, where acquired by the present owner.
Literature: Vivien Winch, A Mirror for Mama, 1965, MacDonald, London, illustrated frontispiece.
Exhibited:
Dublin, Royal Hibernian Academy, A Free Spirit, Irish Art, 1860-1960, July 1990.
London, Pyms Gallery, Life and Landscape in British and Irish Painting at the Turn of the Century, 22 May – 22 June 1991, number 18.
In William Orpen’s portrait, Mrs Evelyn St George cuts an extraordinary figure that owes almost as much to her milliner as to the artist. Her form, anchored by a large fur muff and tapestry ‘carpet’ handbag, is topped by a magnificent oversized hat crowned with a mountain of ostrich feathers – a deliberate challenge to the painter. Framing the delicately observed face, for an ordinary painter, it would threaten to destabilise the figure. While the sitter may have encouraged him to court such danger, Orpen instinctively knew what he was doing in artfully arranging the folds of the silver backdrop to ensure compositional equilibrium was retained in what must be one of his most dramatic formal arrangements.
On the eve of the Great War, painter and sitter had lived through times when wealth generated by ‘surplus’ in western Europe and the United States had created ‘leisure class’ collectors. These, induced by a vibrant Old Master market, sought status in the painted portrait. For thirty years, their new money had been arriving in ‘old’ Europe in the form of young, free-spirited American heiresses. Fact and fiction brought them together in Consuelo Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough and Henry James’s Isabel Archer. Their choices were sometimes disastrous and often disapproved.
The latter was the case when on the banks of the Nile, Florence Evelyn Baker (1870-1935) encountered the penniless Irish land agent, Howard Bligh St George. Daughter of George Fisher Baker (1840-1931), founding President of the First National Bank of New York, Florence was aged 21, when they married against her father’s wishes. When installed at Screebe Lodge, Maam Cross, Galway, and producing grandchildren, Baker gradually softened in the couple’s favour. In 1905, while retaining the Connemara house, the St Georges moved to Clonsilla Lodge, near Phoenix Park, Dublin, and by the following year, the painter’s mother had introduced them to her son.[1] This auspicious encounter resulted in a commission to paint three-quarter-length portraits of St George and his wife. The story of the artist’s burgeoning liaison with Evelyn, which began in Galway in 1908, has been frequently retold. It resulted in the birth of their daughter, Vivien, on New Year’s Day 1912, numerous drawing of her as a baby, and Orpen’s portrait of the child aged six.[2] For little Vivien, although St George was her ‘Dad’, her father, known as ‘Woppy’, was ‘doted’ upon; he was ‘so uncannily intuitive, he had but to play the paper for me to follow him with the blind compulsion of the most besotted rat in all Hamelin’.[3]
Two ‘swagger’ portraits of Mrs St George survive – the celebrated full-length of 1914 (fig 1) and the present work.[4]
In both pictures we find the same black fur boa with weighted gold tassels and favourite green jade bracelet, while the navy tailored tunic in the present work confirms the sitter’s sophisticated taste in the latest couture. Her daughter tells us that ‘like a migratory bird’, Mrs St George would visit London and Paris every year ‘to indulge in an orgy of mornings spent with the great dress-makers.’[5] While treatment of the background and other details suggests that the two pictures were painted at roughly the same time, the possibility remains that the present three-quarter-sized canvas is that of 1906 and that its current appearance may well follow a later reworking carried out at the sitter’s request.[6] This would explain inconsistencies in the lighting of the face.[7] Elsewhere, the handling tends to suggest a later date – c. 1914. In the barely visible white glove holding the bag – look at that hand! – Orpen’s signature qualities, those recognised by his pupil, Seán Keating, are revealed. Orpen had, Keating observed, an instinctive ability to translate things in life into vibrant brushstrokes.[8]
Thus, Orpen’s secret lover springs to life. Tall, elegant, ‘cylindrical like the best asparagus’ she projects a formidable presence.[9] One that the painter famously caricatured (fig 2) when they were seen together in London restaurants.
Although ‘talk’ raged around them, their relationship survived the war and only ended, by mutual consent, in 1921. His celebrated sitter only outlived the painter by four years.
Kenneth McConkey.
[1] Bruce Arnold, Orpen, Mirror to an Age, 1981 (Jonathan Cape), pp. 184-5. Howard Bligh St George, a distant cousin of Annie Orpen, the painter’s mother. Anxious to support her favourite son, Annie is thought to have introduced Orpen to Mrs. St George in 1906.
[2] Sold Sotheby’s, 10 December 2014, lot 106. The present sitter also features in Interior at Clonsilla with Mrs St George, 1908, Private Collection, sold Sotheby’s 16 May 2002, lot 79.
[3] Vivien Winch, A Mirror for Mama, 1965 (MacDonald), page 23.
[4] Mrs Howard St George was sold Sotheby’s 16 May 2003, lot 57.
[5] Winch 1965, page 14.
[6] Apart from the fact that the sitter looks younger in the present work, close examination of thin paint in the upper left curtain area of the canvas, suggests underpainting not consistent with the surface, while thicker paint in the upper right, may equally obscure an earlier working. We know that Mrs St George, having reduced her full-length portrait, was quite capable of insisting on alterations.
[7] Were the face to be lit from above, as the shadows on the curtain suggest, one would expect the eyes to be shaded by the projecting rim of the hat, as in the full-length portrait and other important three-quarter-lengths such as in A Spanish Dancer 1907, and Bridgit – A Picture of Miss Elvery 1909 (both Private Collections).
[8] See Seán Keating, ‘William Orpen: A Tribute’, Ireland Today, Vol 2, number 8, August 1937, pages 21-26.
[9] Andrew Wilton introd., The Swagger Portrait, (exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery), page 208 referring to the full-length portrait.
Post by Dominic Lee, Orpen Research Archives.
See a previous post on a son of Evelyn St George – https://www.sirwilliamorpen.com/howard-avenel-st-george-by-william-orpen/