The first question to spring to mind concerning this most welcome and in-depth study of the Irish–British painter Sir William Orpen (1878–1931) is why the Imperial War Museum? Recently, there have been notable exhibitions of his contemporaries Augustus John and William Nicholson at the Tate and the Royal Academy respectively, but Orpen it seems does not merit a star ‘art venue’, his life’s achievement (only a fraction of which was actually devoted to the subject of war) being relegated to a repository of machines of mass destruction.
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