Bea Orpen - Terenure Garden and Broken Lobster Pots

Bea Orpen (1913-1980) served as a member of the governing authority of the National Institute for Higher Education, Dublin, the forerunner of Dublin City University. She was appointed in recognition of her work in art and adult education. In this context and in her several public roles, including as a leading figure in the Irish Countrywomen’s Association (national president, 1974-76), she was known as Bea Trench. As an artist, she was Bea Orpen.

The painting, Terenure Garden, was presented to DCU in 1995 by Terry Trench. This picture was painted in February 1942 from a window of the Dublin flat where Bea, Terry and their son Fiachra, then five months old, lived. It was shown in the RHA exhibition later the same year. It is one of a series of views she painted from upstairs – including several from bedroom windows in the family’s later Drogheda home – that reflect her position as a mother of young children, painting alongside them as they slept.

Terenure Garden is notable for its hard lines, geometric shapes and very specific features, when compared with the less formal style of her later work. Broken Lobster Pots represents that work, in that it depicts a fairly generic scene in the western coastal counties. It is highly unusual, however, in that it is painted in oil; gouache was her first choice from the 1940s onwards, as in Terenure Garden