page_title: William Orpen
section_title: 1918
hierarchical_section_title: William Orpen / World War One / 1918
caption_attribution_description: English: The Mad Woman of Douai image: A scene set in the ruins of a church. The East-facing fall of the apse is all that remains, and the crucifix still intact. A group of peasants stand around a woman sitting on a chair next to a table. She has an expression of horror frozen on her face and her hands clasped tightly in her lap. Two of the peasants lean close to her, while another pair stand behind with their heads together. To the right three others stand in an attitude of sorrow. A soldier stands leaning on his rifle beyond them. The decayed corpse of a soldier lies on the ground in front, his pose mirroring that of the soldier standing above. In the left foreground there is a grave marked with a helmet, and the boot of the dead soldier protrouding from the end. The devastated remains of Douai lie beyond this scene, and the dark shadows of mountains in the distance.
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: Orpen returned to France in July and spent a second summer painting on the old Somme battlefield and making frequent trips to Paris to complete a series of portraits of Canadian commanders. Later he painted the immediate aftermath of the fighting at Zonnebeke that had taken place during the Fifth Battle of Ypres. Orpen made it clear he wished to remain in France and was keen to work in the newly liberated towns. By the end of the summer of 1918, Orpen was mentally exhausted and his works became increasingly theatrical, less realistic and more allegorical. In Harvest (1918), which shows women tending a grave covered in barbed wire, he used a garish palette of colours to emphasize the unreal nature of the scene. While Bombing: Night and Adam and Eve at Peronne seem somewhat flawed compositions, other paintings were far more successful. Most notably, The Mad Woman of Douai is a harrowing depiction of the aftermath of a rape. When Orpen met the woman some time afterwards she was 'silent and motionless, except for one thumb which constantly twitched'. The two soldiers in the picture are both figures borrowed from other paintings of his, as is the grave in the foreground. Orpen had been shocked to see a number of such burial mounds with, as he wrote, "arms and feet showing in lots of cases".
  As the war entered its final stages Orpen witnessed scenes which he found increasingly macabre. One day, even the broad-minded Orpen was shocked to encounter three young French prostitutes offering their services next to a burial party at a grave site. Towards the end of the war he painted a handful of 'parable paintings', such as Armistice Night, Amiens and The Official Entry of the Kaiser, that used black humour to re-imagine the coming victory. Most of these paintings were never displayed in public after the war. In November 1918, Orpen collapsed and became seriously ill. Yvonne Aubicq spent two months nursing him before he moved to Paris in January 1919 to begin work on his next commission.
caption: The Mad Woman of Douai (1918) (Art.IWM ART 4671)
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