Winston Churchill

Sir Winston Churchill, the painter who took time out to become a legend.

He was probably the most famous, and certainly one of the best amateur painters of the 20th century, and probably several other centuries as well. Late in his life he said, "When I get to heaven I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting, and so get to the bottom of the subject." His name was Winston S. Churchill; and over a period of some 45 years and in more than 500 paintings, he certainly made quite an effort to "get to the bottom of the subject" during his lifetime here on earth. In 1982, Sir Hugh Casson, the president of the England's Royal Academy of Art said of Churchill, he was "...an amateur of considerable natural ability who, had he had the time to study and practice, could have held his own with most professionals, especially as a colourist." The writer John Lavery in his book on Churchill titled The Life of a Painter went even further, "Had he chosen painting instead of statesmanship, I believe he would have been a great master with the brush..."



Winter Sunshine, Chartwell, 1925, Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill was 41 when he first picked up a brush to paint. The year was 1915. His political career was in shambles. As First Lord of the Admiralty, he'd been blamed with the failure of the Dardanelles expedition and relegated to a minor government position. During the summer, he and his wife Clementine rented a small farm in Surrey. One of their frequent visitors was his brother Jack and his wife Goonie. Goonie loved sketching in watercolors and one day in June; Winston came upon her painting at her easel in the garden. He paused and watched, then, encouraged by his sister-in-law, he borrowed her brush and tried painting a few strokes. So began the rest of his life as a painter.

The Facade of Saint Marcos, 1896-97,
Walter Sickert, Churchil's favorite artist.

Churchill's first few paintings were in watercolour, but he found them limiting. His favourite art term was "audacity" and in switching to oils, as his neighbour and sometimes art instructor, John Lavery put it, he left his canvases cowering before him. Despite his audacity with a brush, Winston was always quite modest about his skills as a painter, and always ready to seek out the advice and instruction of those artists he respected. Perhaps most influential was Walter Sickert. Sickert had studied under Degas and was undoubtedly the strongest link between French and British Impressionism. Moreover, he was generous with his time and advice. The two men often worked together side by side and also exchanged lengthy letters on painting. Sickert taught Churchill the use of photographs as memory aids and the use of a magic lantern to project a photograph on to a canvas. Having had no training at all in draughtsmanship, for Churchill, Sickert's instruction was a godsend in this respect.

Windlesham Moor, 1934, Winston Churchill, recently discovered in an attic after 30 years,
valued at approximately $200,000.

More than half of Churchill's paintings were produced during the 1930s. His painting paraphernalia was always a part of his baggage during his official travels and he never missed an opportunity to set up at a particularly enchanting location to enjoy his hobby. His bodyguard during many of these years was a former member of the French Foreign Legion, Sergeant Edmund Murray, who was also a painter in oils. Murray recalled that Churchill often asked him for advice, and that sometimes he even heeded it. During the early years, Churchill often exhibited anonymously. In 1920, he sent to Paris five paintings under the name Charles Morin, four of which sold for 30 pounds each. Using another pseudonym, he won his first prize in 1925, for a painting entitled, Winter Sunshine, Chartwell (above, left). Confident that his work had merit beyond his famous name, Churchill gradually allowed his hobby to become part of his public persona. Between the two world wars, he began to enjoy some acclaim as an amateur painter.

Tower of Katoubia Mosque near Casablanca, 1943, Winston Churchill

However, his role as Prime Minister during the Second World War left Churchill virtually no time at all to paint. Between 1940 and 1945, he completed exactly one painting The Tower of Katoubia Mosque near Casablanca (above), which he presented to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a gift). But after Churchill's humiliating defeat in the Parliamentary elections of 1945, as he had 30 years before, he suddenly found himself with time on his hands. And just as before, he once more picked up paint and brushes to fill them. High profile shows in England and the US followed, with one of his paintings bringing at auction a price of $39,200. Twelve years after his death in 1965, one of his paintings sold for 148,000 pounds. The buyer, when asked if he'd purchased the painting because of the measure of the man or the measure of the man as an artist, Dr. Arthur Frankfurter, the editor of Art News magazine replied, "Well, I should think it was both...the only answer I can give is that I know of no painter who would have made as good a prime minister."





Villa on the Nivelle, 1945, Winston Churchill



Georg Arnold-Graboné

My copy of an Alpine landscape (heavily edited). Anyone recognize the image or know the name of artist?

Many years ago, 1969 to be exact, shortly after I was discharged from the U.S. Air Force, I spent a few weeks helping my aunt and uncle redecorate a home they'd just purchased. Both were anxious to encourage my slowly evolving art skills. They commissioned a double portrait and asked me to copy an old Alpine print they had hanging over the couch in their living room. It was probably ten or twenty years old at the time and starting to fade with age. I never knew the name of the artist. The results (above) as seen from an old Polaroid color print, was among the best work I'd done at the time and the first landscape I'd painted since high school (I was about twenty-four at the time). Today, as I was picking through the paintings of the German landscape painter, Georg Arnold-Grabone, I had such a feeling of deja-vu... I don't know if the print I copied was by Arnold-Grabone or not, but my thinking is it could have been, it's so similar to his work.

The title of this is (I swear), Mountain Farm in the High Mountains,
by Georg Arnold-Grabone

Despite its redundant title, it's interesting to compare Arnold-Grabone's Mountain Farm in the High Mountains (above) as to style, composition, and content with the print by the unknown artist I copied at the top. To be fair, I also found two or three other artists doing this type of work who would be likely candidates to have originated my uncle's print. Arnold-Grabone's Summer at the Lake (below) is quite close to it as to color and composition. The more I studied and compared his work, in searching for similarities, the more came to admire the artist's rugged mountain landscapes.

Summer at the Lake, Georg Arnold-Grabone

Matterhorn Landscape,
Georg Arnold-Grabone

Usually it's about here I include a few self-portraits of the artist and a brief biography. Today you're going to have to be satisfied with just the brief biography in that I can't even locate a photo of this man, much less a self-portrait. In fact faces seem not to have been his forte. I could not find a single figure in any of his works (which is not to say he never painted people). Georg Arnold was born in Munich in 1896, the son of the Regional-President Wilheim von Arnold. He studied at the Munich Art Academy. In 1914 the young artist passed the academy exit examination, and volunteered as an enlistee in the Kaiser's Army. While serving in World War I, Arnold suf-fered a head injury from a grenade explosion. The injury left him temp-orarily without hearing or speech. Because of his injuries he was discharged from the army. He returned to his native homeland.

Every landscape painter has a favorite location.
This was Arnold-Grabone's favorite.

With no additional schooling, Arnold began to paint everything in sight. His speech and hearing gradually returned as did his love of painting. He began to study formally in Stuttgart and Vienna under Professor Lippert. There he became a member of a circle of painters known as the “Licht-Gruppe" (light group). During the 1920s, Arnold began to abandon Cubism and other experimental forms to embrace a more traditional painting style. He returned to Munich where he studied landscape painting under Heinrich von Zügel, Leo von Konig, and in Berlin with the well-known German impressionist, Max Liebermann. After winning a gold medal in 1928 for his oil painting, Hardanger Fjord, Arnold moved to Zurich where he taught at an art academy, later becoming its Rector. His View on the Catinaccio’ (below) dates from this period.

View on the Catinaccio’, 1930, Georg Arnold-Grabone

Lodzie Rybackie, 1950,
Georg Arnold-Grabon

It wasn't until 1936 that Arnold began to use the name Graboné as a professional moniker rather than Arnold. Graboné was derived from his family's traditional hometown. Although Arnold-Grabone was financially successful as a painter, he painted largely because of his love of the aesthetic. Arnold-Grabone is also well remembered as a marine painter as well. His Island of Capri (below) exhi-bits much the same bold brushwork as Arnold-Grabo-ne's Alpine mountains, only at a somewhat lower altitude.


Island of Capri, Georg Arnold-Grabone

In 1951 U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower was stationed in Garmisch, (southern) Germany as the NATO commander of occupied Europe. To relieve stress, former British Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, encouraged Eisenhower to make painting his hobby. Eisenhower followed Churchill’s advice. He began to take lessons from Arnold-Graboné. At that time, the artist had his studio only a convenient short distance from Eisenhower’s headquarters. However, for a period of time later, Eisenhower flew twice-a-week from Paris to Fürstenfeldbruck, and then by automobile to Tutzing in order to continue his art lessons. The two formed a friendship that later found one of Arnold-Graboné’s paintings hanging in the White House. The former president also hung one of Arnold-Grabone's paintings at his home in Gettysburg.

An Eisenhower mountain scene in Germany.

Georg Arnold-Graboné’s group of American friends at NATO headquarters allowed him to market his works to the NATO junior officers whom he often invited to exhibitions of his work. As a consequence, many young American officers purchased paintings and brought them back to the United States. Through Eisenhower, Arnold-Graboné eventually came to know England's Sir Winston Churchill. Churchill was interested in the artist's palette knife technique and asked him for some help. The two of them spent several weeks one summer in the early 1950s painting together on the Isle of Man. Churchill, unlike Eisenhower, never gravitated to Arnold-Grabone's Alpine subject matter, preferring instead to paint seascapes and ships. Churchill's A View of Marrakesh (below), dating from 1950-51, is about the only painting the elder statesman ever did involving mountains.



A View of Marrakesh, 1950-51, Winston Churchill.

 

Sir Oswald Hornby Joseph Birley

Between 1934 and his death in 1952, Birley painted the whole
royal family including Queen Mary (not shown), wife of King
George V (lower-right).

In commenting upon portrait painters, someone (maybe me, I forget) once noted that portrait artists attain fame not by how they paint but by who they paint. That is, by moving the "w" two places to the left, so to speak. That's admittedly something of an oversimplification in that how portrait artists paint determines to a great extent who they paint. That is, if the artist doesn't paint well...well, he doesn't paint...at least no one of any great significance. It seems to me that the English, perhaps more than any other nation of art appreciators, have long set great importance on the painted portrait. From the time Anthony van Dyck rendered the first of a dozen or more portraits of King Charles I, until the present day and the more than nine-hundred portraits of Queen Elizabeth II, such works have become the mainstay of British art. One artist, Sir Oswald Hornby Joseph Birley, would probably have agreed with all of the above. At any rate, he certainly benefited from this British infatuation with portraiture.



India Dewar is seen restoring a portrait of Winston Churchill
by Oswald Birley.

Sir Winston Churchill,
Oswald Birley

Although there were dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of excellent portrait art-ists working in England during the first half of the 20th-century, none of them enjoyed the consistent patronage of the royal family, House of Windsor, more than Birley. Along with this royal favor came dozens of other commissions from the British upper classes, especially those in government, the military, and financial sectors. Along with King George V, his wife, Queen Mary, their son, King George VI, his wife Queen Elizabeth (the Queen Mother), and their daughter, the present monarch, Princess Elizabeth (before she became queen), Birley could count among his other famous subjects Sir Winston Churchill (to whom he also gave lessons), Mahatma Gandhi, Gener-als Eisenhower (below) and Montgomery, Admiral Mountbatten, and Air Marshal Trenchard. He also painted the wealthy American financiers Andrew Mellon and J. P. Morgan, the psychiatrist Sir James Crichton-Browne, and Welsh architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis.

Dwight Eisenhower, 1951, Oswald Birley,
whom he painted shortly before his death in 1952.

Oswald Birley,
photo of a self-portrait

Oswald Hornby Joseph Birley was born into an old Lancashire family in 1880 almost by accident in New Zealand, while his parents were on a world tour. Upon returning to England, he was educated at Harrow School, London, and Trinity College, Cambridge. During WW I, Birley served in France, first with the Royal Fusiliers (soldiers originally armed with light, flintlock muskets called fusils). Later he transferred to the Intelligence Corps. He obtained the rank of captain and was awarded the Military Cross in 1919. During World War II he served with the rank of major in the Home Guard.


Painting of a Young Man,
attributed to Oswald Birley

Most of Birley's portraits were painted between the wars, his last being a portrait of NATO Supreme Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1951. Lest you get the idea that Birley painted only royalty and wizened old men, two portraits from a younger generation stand apart for their exceptional strength and youthful character, that of Woolworth heiress, Barbara Hutton (below), painted as a teenager, and that of an unknown young man (right). The Painting of a Young Man is an attribution in that it was originally a full-length portrait, but was cut down. The artist's signature was on a portion discarded as scrap.
 

Barbara Hutton, Oswald Birley

 

 

Yousuf Karsh

Among Karsh's earliest portrait photos this one has turned out to be his most
famous. Dating from 1941, this iconic image of a scowling Winston Churchill became
a cover for Life magazine, May 21, 1945, as WW II came to an end in Europe.
More than a dozen of Karsh's images have ended up on the cover of Life.

 

Yousuf Karsh Self-portrait, 1955.

One of the inherent difficulties any portrait artist faces is the fact that he or she is only as famous as those they portray. There are exceptions, of course. Leonardo was more famous than his Mona Lisa, whom he made famous. Thomas Gainsborough was more famous than his Blue Boy. Norman Rockwell was at least as famous as virtually everyone he painted. If you paint a lot of portraits of a lot of famous people, then to some small extent, their fame tends to rub off. These observations also apply to those artists utilizing their skills in portrait photography. Portrait photographers such as Anna Leibovitz, Richard Avedon, and Edward Steichen have become famous primarily for who they've photographed, though their list of celebrities would not be very long if they not very good at their art.

 



Mackenzie King, 1941, Yousuf Karsh

In terms of portrait photography, one artist, Yousuf Karsh, probably best exemplifies this "rubbing off" of fame from the portrayed to the portrayer. Karsh was Armenian by birth--1908, in the city of Mardin, located along the southern border of present-day Turkey. As a child he endured the Great Armenian Genocide of 1915-22 during which 1.5-million died. He saw relatives massacred and watched his sister starve to death. In 1924 his parents sent their 16-year-old son to Quebec, Canada, to live with his uncle, who happened to be a photographer. Through his uncle, he was apprenticed to the Boston photographer, John Garo. In 1928 Karsh returned to Quebec as an assistant to photographer, John Powls, who retired shortly thereafter, allowing Karsh to take over the business. Karsh moved his studio to Parliament Hill where he came to be noticed by the Prime Minister, Mackenzie King (above, left), who introduced the talented and equally ambitious young photographer to visiting dignitaries. Karsh's list of famous people who posed for his giant 8 by 10-inch format box camera began to grow.

Albert Einstein, 1948, Yousuf Karsh

Karsh's men seldom smiled.

One of his earliest contacts through King was then British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill (top). Karsh's pose and expert lighting combined with Churchill's scowling countenance to create an image of the man that still resonates today. Karsh's photo has appeared on British, U.S., Canadian, and Australian stamps, (but not those of Germany). It will soon take its place on the new U.K. five-pound note (due out in 2016). Tradition has it that the famous scowl came as a result of Karsh having snatched away Sir Winston's ever-present cigar just seconds before clicking the shutter. In any case, Churchill was joined on the list of Karsh's famous portraits by historic images of Albert Einstein (above), Ernest Hemingway, Nikita Khrushchev, Martin Luther King Jr., Indira Gandhi, Walt Disney, Pablo Picasso, several popes, numerous movie stars, nearly every President during his lifetime, even Queen Elizabeth II, herself. The queen, lacking a cigar, didn't scowl.

During his long career (he died in 2002 at the age of 94) Yousuf Karsh
worked almost exclusively in black and white. However, on rare
occasions, such as this 1986 portrait of cartoonist, Charles Schulz, (and
some of his papal portraits), Karsh proved equally adept in the use color.






 

 

Walter Sickert

Walter Sickert Self-portrait, 1896

As artists grow older, they begin to be haunted by thoughts of who they "might have been" or what they "might have done." At least, those thoughts have occurred to me. One artist from the latter part of the 19th century could be said to be more famous for who he "might have been." For nearly thirty-five years, writers such as Stephen Knight and Jean Overton Fuller, with some justification, have made the English painter, Walter Sickert, famous for who he "might have been." They (and others) contend Sickert "may have been" the London serial killer, Jack the Ripper, or at least an accomplice. There's little doubt, based on his work, that Sickert had an obsession with the 1888 Whitechapel killer. But then again, Sickert had a similar fascination with other grisly tabloid murders such as his Camden Town Murder series (below), the title and subject for several works dating from 1908. As for Jack the Ripper, Sickert claimed to have slept in a boarding house room once occupied by the killer. He even did a painting to the room to prove it.



The Camden Town Murder, (sometimes know as, What Shall We Do for the Rent),
1908, Walter Sickert

Walter Sickert was born in Munich, Germany, in 1860. His father, Oswald Sickert, was also an artist, of Danish-German descent. When Walter was eight, the family moved to England where he first wanted to be an actor, but then, finding little success, studied art at King's College until he was eighteen, then fell in with James McNeill Whistler as a studio assistant specializing in printmaking. Sickert's first works were from the early 1880s, small pieces exhibiting the strong influence of Whistler. His style was loose, impressionistic, with heavy impasto rendering.

Katie Lawrence at Gatti's, 1888, Walter Sickert

In 1883, Sickert traveled to Paris where he met Edgar Degas. He seems to have picked up Degas' style and his taste for "fast" women, or at least his taste for painting them. Sickert's 1888, painting, Katie Lawrence at Gatti's was seen as scandalously undeserving of any artist's time and effort. Katie Lawrence was a singer, who at that time were deemed only one baby-step above the world's oldest profession. The painting was called ugly, tawdry, vulgar, and some other unprintable adjectives. Apparently Sickert loved the attention, he went on to paint numerous other French female entertainers.



Ennui, 1913, Walter Sickert

As the 20th century dawned, Sickert found himself the leader of the British avant-garde, sometimes referred to as the Camden Town Group. Though he flirted with Impressionism, after the turn of the century he became an important transitional figure between that and modernism. The transition was not subtle, moved along by Sickert's second profession as a highly opinionated art critic, sort of a 20th century John Ruskin (whose death he celebrated with a cigarette). His most famous painting from this era (some say the best of his lifetime) was his mysterious Ennui (left, French for boredom) series, four nearly identical paintings, set in a kitchen, which Sickert claimed contained clues as to the identity of Jack the Ripper as being of royal blood (having to do with the painting on the wall).

Winston Churchill, 1928,
Walter Sickert.

Later in life, Sickert continued painting common people doing common things (as seen in Ennui) as well as casino and saloon low-life. He also garnered his share of celebrity portraits and admirers, including future British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill (right). When I began researching Sickert, the name caught my eye only because he's said to have given Sir Winston a few painting tips while painting his portrait. Churchill later claimed his own work was influenced by Sickert, who also influenced younger British artists, Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon, David Bomberg, and Leon Kossoff. As for Churchill's idol having been Jack the Ripper, that seems to have been just a fantasy of his deep, dark, daring, Sickert imagination. He died in 1942 at the age of 82.



 

William Orpen

Job, 1905, Sir William Orpen, human suffering stripped bare.                       

Dead Germans in a Trench,
 1918, William Orpen

Thankfully, about fifty years ago, some very wise military official at the Pentagon decided that art and war don't mix. Today, I doubt there's a single nation on earth which hasn't come to that same conclusion. However, as recently as the Vietnam War during the 1960s, the U.S. Army was still sending artist-soldiers to the war zone to make sketches and preliminary drawings. These they took to Hawaii for seventy-five days where they completed their paintings, before turning them over to the Army's war museum. I'm not sure if someone decided it was a dumb idea to start with, a waste of time, effort, and money, not to mention a needless risk of lives; or if the longstanding tradition had been too longstanding. Perhaps artists began to resist the propagandizing of heroic warfare in favor of vividly depicting the waste and brutality of war, thus making the whole effort seem counterproductive. In any case, what with the modern advances in color photography, and motion pictures, there were more valid and practical means by which to record the horrors of combat.

 

Zonnebeke, 1918, William Orpen

William Orpen, Self-portrait
with Sowing New Seed, 1916.

The decision was a long time in coming. Though there was a certain amount of crude photography and even motion pictures as far back as World War I, most of the images of that war which come to mind, first came to the eyes and minds of artists sent into combat. The British were especially fond of this habit; and one of the best they sent was William Newenham Montague Orpen. His images stand out insofar as war art (not the art of war) in that they are so nakedly honest. At a time when nations still went to war for "God and Country" rather than oil and imaginary weapons of mass destruction, Orpen painted the contradictory ironies of war, the desperation, the suffering, the scars, the dead, the dying, and all the other ugliness which, until then, was either ignored or censored by those who viewed warfare as simply a political bludgeon.

Portrait of Grace, the Artist's First Wife, 1907, William Orpen.
They were married in 1901 and had three daughters.

Mrs. Ruby Melvill, 1920, William Orpen

Orpen's self-portrait (above, right) with his dour, cynical expression, might suggest he was the perfect man for such work. But that wasn't really the case. William Orpen was something of a high-living society portrait artist, more adept at wooing beautiful women (above), charming them into looking charming themselves, then deftly capturing that elegance and charm with paint on canvas. He was equally at home with the likes of John Singer Sargent and Walter Sickert, neither of whom likely knew a hand grenade from a wine bottle. Orpen was an Irishman from Dublin, born in 1878, the youngest son of a lawyer and a bishop's daughter. Both his parents being amateur painters. Orpen grew up in a family environment of wealth and privilege. His training in art began in Dublin at thirteen and ended eight years later at London's prestigious Slade School of Art. Insofar as his style and content of his early work were concerned, Orpen was something of a show-off, playing around with fake painted frames, convex mirrors, and six-foot wide scenes from Hamlet. In other words, Orpen had what it took to get noticed. The old saying, "it's not what you know, but who you know," or for a portrait artist "not so much how you paint but who you paint," pretty much says it all in explaining the rapid rise of the ambitious young charmer from Ireland.

The Refugee, 1917, William Orpen

The Refugee, 1918, William Orpen

Winston Churchill,
1916, William Orpen

If his family and social connections served him well in obtaining portrait commissions, when war came, they also allowed him to wheedle a commission in the British army as a war artist. Despite delicate social refinements of his profession, Orpen was far from a shrinking violet. Besides, painting a war is a lot easier and safer than fighting in one. Perhaps, but Orpen soon found out the differences were mostly superficial. For a time, Orpen had to be satisfied with clerical duties during which he concentrated on painting portraits of those, such as Winston Churchill (right) who might move his career along, and most of all, get him to the front lines where he might really make a name for himself. In January, 1916, Orpen finally got his chance. While the other wartime artists were given an honorary rank of second lieutenant and restricted to three weeks visiting the front lines, Orpen was made a major and allowed unspecified leave to be at the Front. Another officer was appointed as his military aide, a car and driver were made available in France while Orpen paid for a personal assistant (called a batman) to accompany them.

Tanks, 1917, watercolor, William Orpen.

Once in France, Orpen travelled to the Somme, setting up his base in Amiens. He arrived three weeks after the Germans had pulled back to the Hindenburg Line. Each day Orpen would be driven to locations such as Thiepval, Beaumont-Hamel, or Ovillers-la-Boisselle to sketch Allied troops or German prisoners, recording the devastation left on the battlefields amid the frozen, desolate landscape. However he didn't submit any of his work. When reprimanded for that, Orpen had his friends at the top move the reprimanding officer to other duties. In May 1917, he painted a portrait of his boss, Sir Hugh Trenchard, the commander of the Royal Flying Corps. The image was widely reproduced in British newspapers and magazines.

Thiepval, 1917, Sir William Orpen

Blown Up Mad, 1917, William Orpen

Orpen saw the war-torn landscape as a massive graveyard. During the summer of 1917, the only people he saw on the empty battlefields were burial parties working to identify and inter the thousands of bodies left in open, abandoned trenches. He frequently encountered dead bodies and human remains, often little more, he wrote, than, "skulls, bones, garments" (above). Orpen pushed himself to find artistic and pictorial strategies adequate to horrors he saw. He stopped using half-tones and half-shades and adopted a new palette of colors--weak purples, mauves and bright green, with large white spaces representing the effect of bright sunlight on the chalk soil, contrasting with a strong cobalt blue sky. Orpen also encountered the "living dead," soldiers who had been traumatized by the fighting. He made, several powerful paintings based on these meetings much like Blown Up Mad (left) from 1917.

Peace Conference, Quai d'Orsay, 1919, William Orpen



Portrait Of Woodrow Wilson,
1919, William Orpen

When the war ended, Orpen's paintings were an immense hit with the public at several London gallery shows, which put him in the enviable position of remaining in Paris to, in a sense, "paint the peace," or at least what the Allies naively hoped would be a lasting piece. Three major works along with several lesser portraits of those dictating "peace" terms to Germany evolved. Of these latter works, Orpen's famous Portrait of President Woodrow Wilson (right), which today hangs in the White House is considered his best. In addition, two giant canvases depict conference diplomats assembled at the Quai d'Orsay in Paris (above) where much of the negotiations were carried on, and the more famous (and thus more familiar) The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, 28th June, 1919,  (below). Besides individual life-size portraits, the two giant "peace paintings" contained dozens of small portraits, each of which demanded private sittings with the artist. William Orpen was one busy portrait painter for a while. He died while visiting London in 1931.

The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, 28th June, 1919, William Orpen

(Detail) The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors (above), 1919, William Orpen