Angel warning the Virgin to escape into Egypt. Above the last two subjects are large reliefs of the Death of the Virgin, surrounded by the apostles, and higher still her Assumption; she stands in a vesica, and is borne by angels to heaven. On the base of the Virgin's tomb is inscribed “Andreas Cionis pictor Florentinvs oratorii archimagister extitit hvjvs mccclix.” Orcagna's own portrait is given as one of the apostles. In addition to these richly-composed subject-reliefs the whole work is adorned with many other single figures and heads of prophets, angels, and the Virtues, all executed with wonderful finish and refinement. The shrine, which forms an aumbry in the reredos, contains a miraculous picture of the Madonna. A fine bronze screen, with open geometrical tracery, encloses the whole. No work of sculpture in Italy is more magnificent than this wonderful tabernacle, both in general effect and in the delicate beauty of the reliefs and statuettes with which it is so lavishly enriched. It cost the enormous sum of 96,000 gold florins. Unfortunately it is very badly placed and insufficiently lighted, so that a minute examination of its beauties is a work of difficulty.
No mention is made by Vasari of Orcagna's residence in Orvieto, where he occupied for some time the post of "capo maestro" to the duomo. He accepted this appointment on the 14th of June 1358 at the large salary (for that time) of 300 gold florins a year. His brother Matteo was engaged to work under him, receiving 8 florins a month. When Orcagna accepted this appointment at Orvieto he had not yet finished his work at Or San Michele, and so was obhged to make long visits to Florence, which naturally interfered with the satisfactory performance of his work for the Orvietans. The result was that on the 12th of September 1360 Orcagna, having been paid for his work up to that time, resigned the post of "capo-maestro" of the duomo, though he still remained a little longer in Orvieto to finish a large mosaic picture on the west front. When this mosaic (made of glass tesserae from Venice) was finished in 1362, it was found to be uneven in surface, and not fixed securely into its cement bed. An arbitration was therefore held as to the price Orcagna was to receive for it, and he was awarded 60 gold florins.
Vasari mentions as other architectural works by Orcagna the design for the piers in the nave of the Florentine duomo, a zecca or mint, which appears not to have been carried out, and the Loggia dei Lanzi in the Piazza della Signoria. It is, however, more than doubtful whether Orcagna had any hand in this last building, a very graceful vaulted structure, with three semicircular open arches on the side and one at each end, intended to form a sheltered meeting-place for the Priori during elections and other public transactions. This loggia was ordered by the General Council of Florence in 1356, but was not actually begun till the year 1376, after Orcagna's death. The architects were Benci di Clone (possibly a brother of Orcagna) and Simone di Francesco Talenti, both men of considerable reputation in Florence. The sculptured rehefs of the seven Virtues in the spandrels of the arches of the loggia, also attributed to Orcagna by Vasari, were later still. They were designed by Angelo Gaddi (1383–1386), and were carried out by three or four different sculptors.
Pupils of Orcagna named by Vasari are Bernardo Nello, a Pisan, Tommaso di Marco, a Florentine, and, chief of all, Francesco Traini, whose grand painting on panel of St Thomas Aquinas enthroned with the arch-heretics at his feet still hangs in the church for which it was painted—Sta Caterina at Pisa. Orcagna had, in addition to the two daughters mentioned above, a son named Cione, who was a painter of but little eminence. Some sonnets attributed to Orcagna exist in MS. in the Strozzi and Magliabecchian libraries in Florence. They have been published by Trucchi (Poesie inedite, ii. p. 25, Prato, 1846). They are graceful in language, but rather artificial and over-elaborated.
Authorities.—Vasari, ed. Milanesi, i. p. 593 (Florence, 1878); Giornale degli Archivi Toscani, iii. p. 282, &c.; Passerini, Curiosità, storico-artistiche; Gave, Carteggio inedito, i. pp. 500–513, ii. p. 5; Rosini, Storia della pittura, vol. ii.; Baldinucci, Professori del disegno, vol. i.; Rumohr, Ricerche Italiane, ii., and Antologia di Firenze, iii.; Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Painting in Italy, i. p. 425 (London, 1864); Perkins, Tuscan Sculptors, p. 77 (London, 1865). (J. H. M.)
ORCHARD (O. Eng. ort-geard, later orceard; a combination apparently of Lat. hortus, garden, and "yard" or "garth"), a
piece of ground enclosed for the purposes of horticulture. The
term was formerly used in a general way for a garden where
herbs and fruit-trees were cultivated, but is now used exclusively
for a piece of enclosed ground for fruit-trees only, and particularly
for apples, pears, plums and cherries.
ORCHARDSON, SIR WILLIAM QUILLER (1835–1910),
British painter, was born in Edinburgh, where his father was
engaged in business, in 1835. “Orchardson” is a variation
of “Urquhartson,” the name of a Highland sept settled on Loch
Ness, from which the painter is descended. At the age of fifteen
he was sent to the Trustees' Academy, then under the mastership
of Robert Scott Lauder, where he had as fellow-students most
of those who afterwards shed lustre on the Scottish school of the
second half of the 19th century. As a student, he was not especially
precocious or industrious, but his work was distinguished
by a peculiar reserve, by an unusual determination that his
hand should be subdued to his eye, with the result that his early
things reach their own ideal as surely as those of his maturity.
By the time he was twenty, Orchardson had mastered the
essentials of his art, and had produced at least one picture which
might be accepted as representative, a portrait of Mr John
Hutchison, the sculptor. For seven years after this he worked
in Edinburgh, some of his attention being given to “black and
white,” his practice in which had been partly acquired at a sketch
club, which included among its members Mr Hugh Cameron,
Mr Peter Graham, Mr George Hay, Mr M‘Taggart, Mr John
Hutchison and others. In 1862 he came to London, and established
himself in 37 Fitzroy Square, where he was joined twelve
months later by his friend John Pettie. The same house was afterwards inhabited by Ford Madox Brown.
The English public was not immediately attracted by Orchardson's work. It was too quiet to compel attention at the Royal Academy, and Pettie, Orchardson’s junior by four years, stepped before him for a time, and became the most readily accepted member of the school. Orchardson confined himself to the simplest themes and designs, to the most reticent schemes of colour. Among his best pictures during the first eighteen years after his migration to London were “The Challenge,” “Christopher Sly,” “Queen of the Swords,” “Conditional Neutrality,” “Hard Hit”—perhaps the best of all—and portraits of Mr Charles Moxon, his father-in-law, and of his own wife. In all these good judgment and a refined imagination were united to a restrained but consummate technical dexterity. During these same years he made a few drawings on wood, turning to account his early facility in this mode. The period between 1862 and 1880 was one of quiet ambitions, of a characteristic insouciance, of life accepted as a thing of many-balanced interests rather than as a matter of sturm und drang. In 1865 Pettie married, and the Fitzroy Square ménage was broken up. In 1868 Orchardson was elected A.R.A. In 1870 he spent the summer in Venice, travelling home in the early autumn through a France overrun by the German armies. In 1873 he married Miss Helen Moxon, and in 1877 he was elected to the full membership of the Royal Academy. In this same year he finished building a house at Westgate-on-Sea, with an open tennis-court and a studio in the garden. He was knighted in June 1907, and died in London on the 13th of April 1910.
Orchardson’s wider popularity dates from 1881. To that year’s Academy he sent the large “On Board the Bellerophon,” which now hangs in the Tate Gallery. Its success with the public was great and instantaneous, and for ten or twelve years Orchardson's work was more eagerly looked for at the Academy than that of any one else. He followed up the “Bellerophon” with the still finer “Voltaire,” now in the Kunsthalle at Hamburg. Technically, the “Voltaire” is, perhaps, his high-water mark. Fine both in design and colour, it is carried out with a supple dexterity of hand which has scarcely been equalled in the British school since the death of Gainsborough. The subject is not entirely happy, for it does not explain itself, but requires a previous knowledge on the part of the spectator of how Voltaire
