A Journey of Discovery for an Artist and an Art Collector

In September 1904 the artist William Orpen and his friend the art-dealer Hugh Lane travelled together to Paris and Madrid. The purpose of their trip was to visit the two cities’ art galleries, and acquaint themselves with the masterpieces there. This letter, from The Grand Hotel de Roma in Madrid, is one of several that Orpen sent to his wife Grace over the course of this journey of discovery.

William Orpen and Hugh Lane first met in London in 1903, and soon became close friends: they were in fact distant cousins on Orpen’s mother’s side. Lane, by virtue of his extensive contacts in the London art world, took on the role of a patron to Orpen, providing him with commissions, as well as  introductions to other clients. In return Orpen introduced Lane to modern art, which Lane up to this point seems to have known little about.

This trip would turn out to be very significant for both men. Orpen visited the Prado for the first time on this visit, where he discovered many treasures of seventeenth century Spanish art. For Lane, it was on this trip that he was to be properly introduced to Impressionist art for the first time.

This was Orpen’s first visit to Spain, and his letters home are full of references to what he saw there: the landscape, the people, and the customs. In this particular one he writes of his excitement at the prospect of going to the bullfight the following day. He worried however that it might all be too much for his nerves: ‘There will be 8 bulls and 16 horses killed for certain’, accompanied by a sketch of the imagined scene – the bull charging around the arena, while Orpen crouches on the edge of his seat, confronted with the spectacle. Orpen often illustrated his letters with quick sketches to reinforce what he had written. Another drawing from the same letter depicts the artist trudging along in torrential rain, in reference to the terrible weather that he was experiencing in Madrid.

The pair spent their time looking at the art that was on display in Madrid. Orpen was particularly impressed by what he saw, sharing his enthusiasm for the work of Velazquez and Goya. However, it seems that the trip was by no means stress free for the two friends. They had very different characters, with little in common other than a shared appreciation for art. As his letters show, Orpen was sociable, interested in what was going on around him, and eager for new experiences. Lane on the other hand was precise and neat, and actually quite prudish, as is demonstrated in an anecdote from Orpen’s letter, illustrated with a pen sketch. One evening the friends visited a  café – ‘a very low place’ – and one of the dancers came and 'chucked Lane under the chin'. As Orpen’s letter continues: ‘you would have laughed to have seen Lane’s face – he nearly fainted.’

In several of his other letters written on the trip Orpen complained about Lane’s lack of stamina. He also fretted about Lane’s frugality, especially at meals. It seems that Lane spent little on food, and was happy to pocket the remains of his lunch to eat later on when he got hungry. Orpen grumbled that he ‘never dined all the time we were in Madrid’. They parted company after several days, possibly the result of some minor disagreement. Lane travelled on to Rome, leaving Orpen to find his own way back to London, after a few more days in Madrid.

Lane made up for his shortcomings on the trip however. After his departure, Orpen discovered a parting gift in his hotel left for him by Lane – a pair of terracotta statues of Adam and Eve by the seventeenth century Spanish sculptor Alonso Cano. Orpen had admired  them when he had seen them earlier in a shop, but unfortunately they were too expensive for him, at over four pounds they were well outside his budget. Unbeknownst to him, Lane had slipped back later and bought them for him as a surprise. Lane’s obsession with saving money on things like food did not stop him from being a thoughtful and generous friend.  

The Spanish art that Orpen saw in the Prado was to be very influential on his work in the years immediately following his visit. Prior to the visit, apart from some examples in the National Gallery of London and the Louvre, he would only have known art like this from photographs. The composition, figure treatment and dramatic lighting effects of Orpen’s works in the period following this visit to Madrid – for example the National Gallery of Ireland’s The Wash House - suggest the influence of Spanish masters, in particular Velazquez, perhaps the latter’s Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus, also in the National Gallery.

Before leaving for Madrid, Orpen and Lane had spent the first day of their trip in Paris, and as Orpen mentioned elsewhere, visited the Louvre and Luxemburg art galleries. However it seems that he also took the opportunity to bring Lane on a visit to the gallery of the art dealer Paul Durand Ruel to view his stock of modern French paintings. These seem  to have been a revelation to  Lane: Orpen later recalled him whispering to him during the visit ‘What is that? Is it a Manet?’. Here, for the first time, Lane was able to experience Impressionist art for himself.

This visit would prove momentous for the progress of modern art in Ireland in the early Twentieth Century. It ultimately led to Lane acquiring a collection of French Impressionist paintings, which he planned to bequeath to the modern art gallery that he proposed to establish in Dublin. Lane would go on to buy some of these works from Durand Ruel, including Eduard Manet’s Eva Gonzales and Music at the Tuileries Gardens, as well as Monet’s Lavacourt under Snow. These paintings are some of the jewels on display in Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery, in partnership with the National Gallery in London. It is surely not too fanciful to speculate that Lane first saw some of them when he visited Durand Ruel’s gallery with William Orpen in September 1904, before travelling on to Madrid.

Foster, Roy, ‘”That Great Pictured Song”: Hugh Lane’s artistic vision for Ireland one hundred years on’. In Sir Hugh Lane: That Great Pictured Song edited by Barbara Dawson and Jessica O’Donnell: Dublin: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 2017, 11-25.

O’Byrne, Robert, Hugh Lane 1875-1915. Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2018.

Turpin, John, ‘William Orpen as Student and Teacher’. In Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 68, No. 271, Autumn, 1979. 173 – 192.

Yseult O'Driscoll, MPhil in the History of Art and Architecture (2022), Department of History of Art and Architecture, Trinity College Dublin