Cuthbert Orde (1888-1968)

Artist Name Cuthbert Orde (1888-1968)
Title Portrait of Artist's Daughter, Julian Orde, Poet
Description This beautiful British Art Deco portrait oil painting is by listed artist Cuthbert Orde. Famous for his male portraits of fighter pilots from World War 2, this is a more personal and earlier portrait of his daughter Julian Orde (1917-1974). 
Julian was a female English poet, writer and actor. She was the eldest child of war artist Cuthbert Orde and Lady Eileen Wellesley, daughter of the 4th Duke of Wellington. (The name Julian had been common in the Orde family for generations, for boys and girls). See below for more details. 

Painted in 1935 it is a half length seated portrait of a Julian with chic short auburn hair and lovely blue eyes. She is dressed in a sleeveless back dress and has a sage green silk cloak around her and over one shoulder. She stands out well against a darker drape behind her. Her auburn hair and green cloak are really vibrant in tone compared to the almost luminous flesh tones. The brushwork and impasto are superb. This a charming British Art Deco thirties oil painting from happier times, before Orde was engaged with painting pilots from the Second World War. 

Signed and dated 1935 in green upper right.
 
Provenance London estate
Medium Large oil on canvas
Size 36 x 30 inches
Frame Quality period gallery frame 47 inches by 37 inches. Excellent condition
Condition Gallery condition
Biography Cuthbert Orde (1888-1968). Throughout his life, Orde strongly identified himself as an artist. In the early 1920s he had a painting studio in Paris. His entries in phone directories for forty years – 1929 up to his death in 1968 – register him as ‘Orde, Cuthbert; Artist’.In his book Pilots Of Fighter Command: Sixty Four Portraits, Orde wrote an essay explaining the circumstances of his portraits of World War II pilots.Having been hired to produce illustrations of bomber stations in the summer of 1940, Air Commodore Harald Peake from the Air Ministry saw some of Orde’s drawings and was impressed by his portraiture. It was the height of the Battle of Britain and public attention was focused on the fighter pilots. Peake asked Orde to make a large number of portraits of them, Orde enthusiastically agreed, and at the start of September set off to work. It is unclear how many portraits he drew in the year or so with Fighter Command. Some sources say up to 300, though Orde only lists 160 in his book Pilots Of Fighter Command. What is clear is that he only drew a small fraction of The Few. 'In no case did I choose the sitter myself. He was selected either by Group Headquarters or by the station commander and, generally speaking, four or five in each squadron were chosen, the four or five who were considered the most valuable. So it was for them rather in the nature of a mention in dispatches, I, merely being the scribe who wrote out the dispatch'. Taking around two hours per picture, Orde drew men whose names have become familiar to those interested in the history of the Battle; Douglas Bader, Sailor Malan, Robert Stanford Tuck, Johnnie Johnson, Archie McKellar, John Freeborn. He usually created monochrome pictures of the men using charcoal and white chalk, though some colour portraits were painted, such as that of Bob Stanford Tuck and a second portrait of Sailor Malan. In drawing the cream of the pilots, names and uniforms soon became out of date as subjects were promoted and decorated. On finishing his drawing of Hugh Dundas, Orde joked, ‘I've left room for the DFC. The people I draw always seem to get it’. Four days later Dundas did.The daily peril of these men’s lives was apparent. Orde states that some choices were killed before he had a chance to draw them. Many did not live much longer after their portrait was done. John Drummond was drawn on 5 October 1940, shortly after landing from what turned out to be his final kill, and is pictured still in his aviator jacket instead of the uniformed outfit Orde commonly depicted. He died five days later. However, having flown in combat himself and lost both his brothers in military incidents twenty years earlier, the proximity of death will not have been new to Orde.

SITTER - JULIAN ORDE
Julian Orde (31 December 1917 – 1974) was a female English poet, writer and actor. Orde was the eldest child of war artist Cuthbert Orde and Lady Eileen Wellesley, daughter of the 4th Duke of Wellington. The name Julian had been common in the Orde family for generations, for boys and girls. In the 1940s, she was the girlfriend of poet WS Graham. She played Bessie in a 1946 TV version of Aimee Stuart’s Jeannie (not to be confused with the 1941 movie version), and co-wrote the 1948 British movie thriller The Small Voice. She had poems included in Kenneth Rexroth's 1948 anthology The New British Poets, in whose biographical notes - as well as claiming to be a couple of years younger - she says she 'was on the stage for six years, but now writes for films and radio'. Her 1946 poem The Changing Wind was included in the 1968 Penguin anthology Poetry of the Forties. She married Ralph Abercrombie in London in 1949. She published poetry afterwards under name Julian Orde Abercrombie. In 1963 she wrote an episode of ATV’s Drama '63 series entitled The Lady And The Clerk. Her death, in 1974 aged 56, moved fellow poet David Wright to compose On A Friend Dying. Her work continues to be read and republished. In 1988 her poem Conjurors was republished in its own pamphlet. The Florist was included in the 1995 anthology The Supernatural Index. Conjurors was again republished in the 2010 anthology A Field of Large Desires.
Price £7,000
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