William Orpen, an Outsider in France: Painting and Writing World War One

William Orpen (1878-1931) was in 1917 appointed as an official war artist in France.

He not only saw the Great War as a call to paint serious subject matter - enabling him to break away from the constraints of society portraiture in London - but also as an opportunity to write. Orpen was commissioned, along with artists such as Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer and Wyndham Lewis, to paint for the Department of Information.

He was the only war artist to keep a written record of his wartime experience, published in 1921 as 'An Onlooker in France'.