An artist's reflections: Peyton Skipwith finds a sensitive but cynical outsider in a substantial exhibition of William Orpen's scintillatingly virtuoso paintings

William Orpen is quoted as having said 'You paint men in different ways, in the same way that you talk to different men in different ways. Painting and talking are merely two different methods of expressing your own character and that of the other fellow'. That may be so, but this seemingly rational statement comes crashing to the ground as soon as one realises that the 'other fellow' that Orpen painted most frequently was himself.

On entering this exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, one is greeted by him posing as Chardin. A little further on we encounter him in reflection peering suspiciously at the viewer from a mirror, his face partly obscured by a variety of notes, labels and tickets ostensibly stuck into the mirror-frame, including a cheque from himself to the City of Dublin Steam Packet and two large stickers with the single word ENGAGED in bold capitals. The painting is on panel, but the labels are real and collaged to the surface as though held in place by the painted frame.

Orpen delighted in such tricks and illusions with mirrors and reflections play an important part in his work. He uses these devices like a conjuror, not just to show off his almost indecent technical skill, which they do, but also as a smoke screen, dazzling the viewer with his dexterity but leaving more questions unanswered than answered--now you see me, now you don't. In all, there are nine oil self-portraits in this exhibition, showing him in various roles, such as artist, jockey, sportsman and soldier; he appears also as a part-player in compositions such as The Play Scene from Hamlet and The Mirror, and as a silhouette in the background of The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, 28th June 1919. His letters, too, were nearly always decorated with self-mocking caricatures of 'little Orps'.

So, to use his own preferred description, in Who's Who, who exactly was 'Major Sir William Orpen, KBE RA'? What did he want us to make of him behind all these disguises, and how should we judge him? The superficial answer is easy. Brilliant draughtsman, consummate watercolourist and virtuoso painter. But is that all? The scale and quality of this exhibition clearly demonstrate that there is a figure of substance behind the work, but a figure as elusive as a leprechaun.

Orpen came from a prosperous Protestant Dublin family and, although he knew many of the figures on both sides of the Irish political divide, chose to base himself in London and identify with the English establishment, so much so that after the Easter uprising in 1916 he spent only a single day in Ireland during the remaining fifteen years of his life. He moved seamlessly from the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art to the Slade, where he joined such rising luminaries as Augustus and Gwen John, William Rothenstein and his brother Albert--later Rutherston--and Ambrose McEvoy and, in 1899, at the tender age of twenty, won the Summer Composition Prize with the staggeringly masterful Play Scene from Hamlet, a vast canvas measuring 175 x 220 cm, in which he not only displays his virtuosity but also sets the agenda for the rest of his life. Realism and illusion are freely intertwined; portraits of his friends mingle with quotations from the old masters, most particularly Rembrandt, who had been the subject of a major exhibition at the Royal Academy earlier that year.

Orpen obviously had an extraordinarily well developed visual memory, which enabled him to quote directly from, or to paraphrase, the works of those artists he admired most. An example of the former is the appearance of Hogarth's Shrimp Girl amongst the revellers in his 1904 canvas Improvisation on a Barrel Organ, whilst many other works including his haunting portrait of Augustus John and The English Nude, whilst both uniquely his own, acknowledge respectively a debt to Whistler's portrait of Carlyle and Rembrandt's Bathsheba at her Bath. He exploits allusion as freely as illusion as a protective device preventing the world from getting too close to him; Robert Upstone in his catalogue essay quotes a line from Konnody and Dark's 1932 biography in which they refer to Orpen as having 'a wilderness of acquaintances and few friends'. This solitariness is born out time and again in the paintings. He emerges in his own estimation as the sad clown, always on the stage, but always apart; however, if he was a clown, from the war years on he was a clown with a savage and ultimately self-destructive streak.

Orpen's facility, like John's, could easily have led to laziness, but he seems to have been driven by a relentless and personal daemon. His obsession with illusion and reflection, with images within images, and images yet further reflected within images, was a constant challenge and the springboard for many of his finest works, such as the Homage to Manet and the Cafe Royal as well as The Signing of the Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, although in the latter his disillusionment prompts him to depict the various leaders of the victorious nations as tired old puppets reduced almost to insignificance by the grandeur of the setting. Contrast this bravura but brittle work with his detached yet intimate study of the Nicholsons, A Bloomsbury Family, painted a dozen years previously, to see how fundamentally the war had changed him, both as man and artist.