Abstract
Royal Academy artist William Orpen (1878–1931) was once the most sought-after and the highest-earning portrait painter in Britain. His posthumous fall from favour was partly due to Tate director John Rothenstein's damning critique of Orpen's inability to fulfil his artistic potential thanks to his ‘divided loyalties’ to Britain and his native Ireland. This essay argues rather that it was precisely Orpen's complex positionality that informed the most innovative of his works, leading him to develop a new approach to representation as such. In this essay Orpen is proposed to operate within the paradigms of ‘minor art’, following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's conception of minor literature. Orpen's self-portraits are presented as an early instance of a shift of artistic focus from the represented to the process of representing, prefiguring the interests of artists working with post-representative strategies some fifty years after his death.
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