The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors


The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, 28 June 1919 is an oil-on-canvas painting by Irish artist William Orpen, completed in 1919. It was one of the paintings commissioned from Orpen to commemorate the Peace Conference at Versailles in 1919. The work is held by the Imperial War Museum, in London.

Background

Orpen was one of the first people chosen as a war artist by the British Ministry of Information in 1917. Orpen was also the official painter at the peace conference and was commissioned to paint three canvases to record the proceedings. The work was the most expensive of the British public art commissions associated with the First World War: Orpen was paid £3,000; by comparison, John Singer Sargent received £300 for his much larger painting Gassed.
The painting depicts the signature of the Treaty of Versailles by representatives from Germany on 28 June 1919 that formally ended the First World War. The group portrait depicts soldiers, diplomats and politicians who attended the conference while the treaty was signed in the opulent surroundings of Louis XIV's Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. High up can be seen the words "Le Roy Gouverne par lui meme". It measures.
Orpen grew to dislike the politicians at the conference and considered them vain and greedy. In his painting, they are dwarfed by the scale of the palace.

Subjects

The people depicted are:
In the front row:
  • Johannes Bell, German Centre Party politician, Reichskolonialminister and Reichsverkehrsminister, sitting in a chair, signing the treaty
  • Hermann Müller, German SPD politician and Reichsaußenminister, stands beside him, leaning over
Seated in the middle row, from left to right:
Standing in the back row, from left to right
Orpen is depicted twice, as an indistinct figure visible in the distorting mirrors behind the main subjects.

Other paintings

Orpen's other paintings of the conference depict preliminary discussions of the "Council of Ten" in the Hall of Clocks at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the Quai d'Orsay, and another showing a coffin lying in state in a marble hall covered by a Union Flag.