Orpen at War

Bombarded by artillery, dodging bullets, crawling through trenches in the Somme, Major William Orpen, society portrait painter, witnesses the grim reality of conflict as he paints the war. This is his story.

During World War I, Major William Orpen, a highly successful commercial painter in Ireland and the UK, takes up a posting as official British war artist. Full of high hopes he sets off to the front with a Rolls—Royce and a driver.

But nothing in his privileged life prepared him for the ho...