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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.
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" (French: "The King governs alone"). It measures 152.4 × 127 centimetres (60.0 × 50.0 in).
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.
The people depicted are:
In the front row:
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.
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.
The Treaty of Versailles was a peace treaty signed on 28 June 1919. As the most important treaty of World War I, it ended the state of war between Germany and most of the Allied Powers. It was signed in the Palace of Versailles, exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which led to the war. The other Central Powers on the German side signed separate treaties. The United States never ratified the Versailles treaty and made a separate peace treaty with Germany. Although the armistice of 11 November 1918 ended the actual fighting, it took six months of Allied negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference to conclude the peace treaty. Germany was not allowed to participate in the negotiations; it was forced to sign the final treaty.
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Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (2001) is a historical narrative about the events of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. It was written by the Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan with a foreword by the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke. The book has also been published under the titles Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World and Peacemakers: Six Months That Changed the World.
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Events from the year 1920 in France.
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Events from the year 1919 in Italy.
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