Homage to Manet – William Orpen Art Print

Manchester Art Gallery Collection.

Orpen worked on this painting for three years. The setting is Hugh Lane's house in South Bolton Gardens, London. Six men are gathered around a breakfast table — George Moore reading aloud from his own memoir about Manet; Philip Wilson Steer and Henry Tonks listening; D.S. MacColl watching; Walter Sickert standing; and Hugh Lane, hand to his forehead, taking it all in.

Above them hangs Manet's portrait of Eva Gonzalès — the painting that Lane had bought from a Paris dealer in 1906 specifically so that Orpen could paint this. Lane was the great Irish collector of his generation, the man who built the Municipal Gallery in Dublin, who died on the Lusitania in 1915 with his will unsigned, triggering a decades-long dispute between Dublin and London over thirty-nine Impressionist paintings.

Orpen is not in the painting. But the room was his studio — he took over Lane's house in South Bolton Gardens after Lane moved on. He painted himself into the mirror in The Mirror. Here he simply arranged the room, painted the men in it, and stepped back.

Available as a 40x50 cm / 16x20″ archival giclée print on heavyweight fine art paper with fade-resistant inks, built to last.

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