page_title: William Orpen
section_title: The Refugee
hierarchical_section_title: William Orpen / World War One / The Refugee
caption_attribution_description: English: The Refugee (b) image: A half-length portrait of Yvonne Aubicq. She sits on an 18th Century style chair against a mottled pastel coloured background. She has her hands drawn defensively up to her right shoulder baring her naked arm to the viewer.
context_page_description: Major Sir William Newenham Montague Orpen, KBE, RA, RHA was an Irish artist who worked mainly in London. Orpen was a fine draughtsman and a popular, commercially successful, painter of portraits for the well-to-do in Edwardian society, though many of his most striking paintings are self-portraits.
  During World War I, he was the most prolific of the official war artists sent by Britain to the Western Front. There he produced drawings and paintings of ordinary soldiers, dead men, and German prisoners of war, as well as portraits of generals and politicians. Most of these works, 138 in all, he donated to the British government; they are now in the collection of the Imperial War Museum. His connections to the senior ranks of the British Army allowed him to stay in France longer than any of the other official war artists, and although he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1918 King's birthday honours list, and also elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts, his determination to serve as a war artist cost him both his health and his social standing in Britain.
context_section_description: Late in 1917 Orpen spent two weeks in hospital with blood poisoning. There he met a young volunteer Red Cross worker from Lille named Yvonne Aubicq. The two began a relationship that was to last ten years and Orpen painted several portraits of her. Two of these he submitted to the official censor early in 1918. Orpen named both paintings A Spy and in March 1918 was interviewed by  A. N.Lee the military censor responsible for the war artists. Lee made it clear that if the title was intended as a joke it was in very bad taste coming so soon after the execution of Mata Hari but if the subject really was a spy then Orpen could be facing a court-martial. Orpen gave Lee a fantastical story that the woman in the picture was a German spy who had been executed by the French but who, in an attempt to save herself, had at the last moment revealed herself naked in front of the firing squad. Lee had Orpen recalled to London to be reprimanded at the War Office. There, Orpen retracted the firing squad story but was ordered to remain in London. Orpen ignored this and, quite illegally, made his way back to France. There he contrived to receive a phone call from Haig's private office, within earshot of several of Lee's colleagues from Army Intelligence, inviting him to dinner with Haig to discuss what he would like to paint next. Lee dropped his objections to Orpen working in France, and Orpen agreed to rename the two pictures The Refugee.
  As the war progressed, Orpen and Lee became good friends; Orpen painted two portraits of him, and they went drinking together in London and maintained a lively correspondence until Orpen's death. It is not clear how well known this friendship was during their lives but if it was known of in Dublin it would have caused consternation and real pain in several quarters. Not only had Lee been the brigade major sent to Dublin to put down the 1916 Easter Rising, but he had been the officer in charge of arranging several of the executions that followed the fighting, including that of Joseph Plunkett, the husband of Grace Gifford, Orpen's star pupil from his teaching days. In fact, between enlisting in the British Army in 1915 and his death in 1931, Orpen spent only a single day, in 1918, in Ireland.
  In May 2010, a third version of The Refugee surfaced on the Antiques Roadshow television programme. The Imperial War Museum had assured its owner that it was a copy by someone other than Orpen, but the programme's art expert, Rupert Maas, determined it was painted by Orpen himself as a 'thank-you' present to Lord Beaverbrook for helping him avoid being court-martialled in March 1918. The picture was estimated to be worth £250,000.
caption: The Refugee (B) (1917), modeled by Yvonne Aubicq, (Art.IWM ART 3005)
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