On the Cliff, Dublin Bay, Morning

From 1909 onwards, William Orpen spent the month of August with his wife, Grace and their two children, at Howth Head overlooking Dublin Bay in a house known as ‘The Cliffs’. The headland afforded panoramic views of the Irish Sea to the east and Bray Head, the Wicklow Hills and ‘Sugarloaf’ mountain to the south. Despite Howth’s popularity with earlier artists such as Nathaniel Hone and Walter Osborne, it remained relatively unexplored, and it was here, on its rugged crown, that Orpen was inspired to paint a number of his most important canvases.

The Howth pictures stand as an evocation of ‘never-to-be-forgotten’ days – a monument to Orpen’s industry and a full expression of his ‘urge’ to create. Nowhere, before 1917, was he more animated with such profound results. In On the Cliff, Dublin Bay, Morning, Grace looks out to the Irish Sea and the rising sun and the painting speaks a universal language about nature and humanity. The romantic fascination with empty seascapes goes back to Caspar David Friedrich, a theme that was taken up by Gustave Courbet, James McNeill Whistler and Claude Monet in the 1850s and 60s. Courbet frequently entitled his seascapes l’immensité to encapsulate and convey the sense of the vast and infinite sea and sky, immense and immeasurable. The windswept Irish headland was a place of isolation, but gazing into its heart, the morning sun breaks through and strikes the dress, the pale-yellow shawl and the face of the figure. Orpen painted the light and atmosphere of Dublin bay, not a studio-confected arcadia.

In later years, the central significance of Howth reappeared in Orpen’s random reminiscences. Then, the whole experience was tinged with nostalgia as he wrote, ‘… of an evening as the sun dips, the water in the bay becomes a brilliant gold … or if the night is fine, the lights along the shore from Bray Head to Dublin, begin to twinkle. And the Sheerwater gulls start their laughter, like a bunch of young girls at the side of the road laughing at the passer-by. Ireland! Romance, laughter and tears!’ (William Orpen, Stories of Old Ireland and Myself, Williams and Norgate Ltd, London 1924, p. 4).