Chance find of Orpen war letters

A CHANCE discovery in the files of a Dublin solicitors’ firm has revealed first-hand accounts of one of Ireland’s most famous artists about the horrors left in the trenches of World War I.

The National Library will display the 10 letters from William Orpen to his father next March, including three written during his time as an official British war artist at the western front in France.

In a three-page letter, dated July 25, 1917, he describes a fright he got during a visit to a trench where he was painting the remains of a German and an English soldier, with skulls, bones, clothes, rifles and water bottles lying around.

“And after a couple of hours I began to feel sort of strange. I did not know if I was lonely or afraid.”

Orpen describes how he stepped back and sat a few yards away, only for a huge puff of wind blowing his canvas over and tearing on the stump of a tree.

“This did not make me feel any better and it was as much as I could do to sit down and start on a fresh canvas,” he wrote.

The letter concludes with Orpen telling how he was consoled when a French artist was similarly moved after visiting the site the following day, meaning his reaction was not unnatural.

The handwritten letters were discovered during a review of 3,500 boxes of unsorted material in the National Library’s 12-year-old building on Kildare Street, where staff are urgently trying to reconfigure storage space. Hundreds of boxes of material from solicitors’ firm Orpen Sweeney were among the collection, and the correspondence turned up on the second day as archivists trawled through records and other material acquired over many decades from legal firms, land agents and the general public.

The National Library hopes its addition to the public display will help further boost visitor numbers next year, already up 28% on 2009 figures, to almost 178,000. The number of Irish people using the library’s genealogy service also continues to grow.