IRISH & INTERNATIONAL ART 29 SEPTEMBER 2025

30 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 SecondWorldWar 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. Kenneth McConkey September 2025 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, €60,000-€80,000 (£52,170-£69,570 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot18 Fig 3. William Orpen, Howard Avenel Bligh St George, 2nd Lieutenant, 1st Life Guards (1894 – 1914), 1915, 134.5 x 82.5 cm, Private Collection, formerly Jefferson Smurfitt Group PLC