For the younger children of Mrs Evelyn St George, Orpen was avuncular. Known as 'Woppy' to Ferris and his sister, Vivien, in the years preceding the Great War, he was almost a member of the family, with a status equivalent to resident magician. Howard Bligh St George, the children's father, was a cousin of Annie Orpen, the artist's mother, and when the wealthy couple and their three older children moved to Clonsilla Lodge, on the outskirts of Dublin, she saw an opportunity for her aspiring portrait painter son (1). In a story that has often been told, Orpen would go on to form a liaison with Mrs St George during the years when both their marriages were under strain, and Ferris and Vivien were born. Contact was undoubtedly facilitated by Orpen's appointment as visiting lecturer at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin in October 1907, and later, by the St Georges' move to England. From the summer of 1912, the St Georges lived, first at Ashorne Hill in Warwickshire for a short time, and then at Coombe Hill, Richmond, in Surrey, with a London flat at 25 Berkeley Square.

Following Ferris's birth on 25 March 1908, Orpen produced portraits of his mother, his elder and younger sisters, Gardenia and Vivien, his elder brother, Avenel, and Ferris himself, first as an infant, then in the present portrait when almost a teenager.

During his childhood, the boy was affectionately known as 'Alcibiades' - 'Master Alci' to the painter - after the Greek general and interlocutor of Socrates. Frederick Ferris Bligh St George (1908-1970) was the St Georges' third son. The most informative account of his childhood is provided by his younger sister, Vivien Winch, who describes him as a 'very shy little boy' (2). They shared the basement at Coombe Hill and the wrath of their sister Gardenia's governess, Miss Smeeton, 'who rapped Ferris over the knuckles practically every day with a glass ruler when he did not play his scales properly' (3). Enduring these horrors, the two children were close - Vivien becoming Ferris's 'devoted shadow', to the extent that she bit a 'sizeable chunk' of his thigh when being teased at the age of four-and-a-half (4). Childhood for both was undoubtedly affected by the death of Ferris's older brother, the nineteen-year-old Avenel, killed by a sniper at Zillebeke on 15 November 1914 (5). The present portrait, the final St George commission, was completed by 1921, possibly with the aid of a photograph taken a few years earlier (6).

While Orpen was enduring the privations of the Western Front three years later, the two children would 'stand shivering at our basement window watching the searchlights as they swung in great arcs across the sky' (7). Ferris would go on to pursue his own military career in Avenel's regiment, the 1st Life Guards, seeing service in the Second World War and reaching the rank of Colonel. He married Maud Radcliffe, a soldier's daughter, in October 1932, while his mother was living on the Isle of Wight. In the 1950s he became High Sheriff of Gloucestershire and he and his bride were keen supporters of the Beaufort Hunt.

Long before this, in the present portrait we confront a talented young batsman, his sleeves rolled, and collar turned up as though he has arrived in the studio, straight from the crease. Delicate fingers clasped over the handle of his bat, and a face carefully lit, indicate that this is both a sensitive lad and one who was polished and was learning inscrutability. Poise as much as pose equally apply as Orpen's mature style assures us of swagger controlled.

Ferris's portrait could well commemorate the occasion at St Boswells in the Scottish Borders when he had been 'caught out, having chalked up a gratifying number of runs' and his mother, 'tired of watching cricket … summoned the Hotchkiss, climbed gracefully aboard and was driven home' (8). The moment passed, the stumps were pulled, and Orpen has left us the penetrating gaze of a young cricketer whose life was before him.

Prof Kenneth McConkey,
September 2025

1. Bruce Arnold, Orpen, Mirror to and Age, 1981, (Jonathan Cape), p. 184.
2. Vivien Winch, A Mirror for Mama, 1965, (MacDonald, London), p. 18. Ferris was three years and nine months older than his sister. They were both 'late' children having two older brothers and a sister. Winch was born on New Year's Day 1912.
3. Winch 1965, p. 20. Ferris's birth was registered in county Dublin when the family were living between Clonsilla Lodge, on the outskirts of the city and Screebe Lodge, Maam Cross, Galway.
4. Winch 1965, pp. 65-6.
5. Following Avenel's death, Orpen produced his full-length portrait in the ceremonial dress uniform of the Life Guards (sold Sotheby's 9 December 2020). In 1918, the artist would paint the blasted landscape at Zillebeke with a dead soldier in the foreground that was owned by the St George family prior to its acquisition by Tate Britain.
6. Orpen was living in Paris most of the preceding year, painting the signatories to the Peace Treaty of Versailles, and before that, on the Western Front from the spring of 1917.
7. Winch 1965, p. 37.
8. Winch 1965, p. 68. St George had acquired Springhill, a house in the Borders near Kelso and close to the home Ferris's schoolfriend, George Trotter,