Rebecca Dulcibella Orpen

British

20 paintings in our database

Orpen is a significant example of the educated Victorian amateur female artist who worked outside the public exhibition system.

Biography

Rebecca Dulcibella Orpen (1830–1923) was a British amateur painter who spent much of her life at Baddesley Clinton, a medieval moated manor house in Warwickshire that was home to the extended Ferrers family. She lived there as part of a devout Catholic household and devoted her considerable artistic talent to documenting the family, its estate, its household, and its religious life. Her output included portraits of family members stretching back through earlier generations — many of them copies after historical portraits — devotional religious subjects, and one of the most remarkable self-portraits in Victorian art: Self-portrait in her Painting Room at Baddesley Clinton (1885), which shows her in her studio surrounded by the evidence of her work. Though trained to a high level — her Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane (1877) shows genuine draughtsmanship — she did not pursue a public exhibition career and her work remained largely within the household for which it was made. She died at ninety-three, having outlived virtually all the subjects she had painted.

Artistic Style

Orpen's style is characterised by careful draughtsmanship and a serious, unshowy approach to her subjects. Her portraits are dignified and honest, avoiding Victorian sentimentality. Her religious subjects show the influence of the Old Masters she copied — Leonardo, Murillo — filtered through personal devotion. Her self-portraits are unusually direct and psychologically engaged for a Victorian woman artist.

Historical Significance

Orpen is a significant example of the educated Victorian amateur female artist who worked outside the public exhibition system. Her body of work at Baddesley Clinton constitutes a unique visual record of a Catholic gentry household and its material culture. The feminist recovery of Victorian women's art history has begun to recognise her as a more substantial figure than the 'amateur' label initially suggests.

Things You Might Not Know

•Orpen (1861–1923) was an Irish painter who studied at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin and later at the Slade in London, part of the generation of women artists who used the new art schools opening to them in the late nineteenth century.
•She was the aunt of the more famous Irish portraitist Sir William Orpen, and the family connection placed her within a remarkable artistic dynasty.
•She exhibited regularly at the Royal Hibernian Academy and was one of the more prominent female professional painters in Ireland during the Edwardian era.
•Her subjects ranged from portraits to domestic interiors and flower pieces, working in a competent realist style influenced by the Munich and London schools.
•Documentation of her life and work is limited, as was typical for women artists of her period, and much of her career remains under-researched.

Influences & Legacy

Shaped By

Slade School training — the rigorous drawing instruction of the Slade under Alphonse Legros shaped her technical foundation
William Orpen (nephew) — while she preceded him, the family's shared training environment created mutual influence

Went On to Influence

She is a representative figure of the generation of Irish women painters who established professional careers in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods against considerable institutional resistance