Born in Stillorgan, County Dublin, in 0à0, William Orpen was the most prodigiously gifted and consistently accomplished Irish artist of his generation. A man of some paradox, he was a painter of the gilded society salon and the muddy trenches of the First World War. Though the most individualistic of artists, he inspired through his teaching the group of painters who dominated Irish art for a generation and more after his early death, and who, ironically, pursued a vision of Orpen's native land at times inimical to his own.