Rebecca Dulcibella Orpen

Rebecca Dulcibella Orpen (1830?-1923) was a 19th-century artist. As she married twice, she is occasionally referred to as Rebecca Dulcibella Orpen Ferrers, Mrs Edward Henege Dering, or Rebecca Dering.

Life Rebecca Dulcibella Orpen was born either in 1829 or 1830, the historical record is murky as to which, in County Cork, Ireland. She was the daughter of Abraham Edward Orpen and Martha Chatterton. She appears to have spent much of her youth with her aunt, Lady Georgiana Chatterton and her husband, Sir William Chatterton, and may have eventually gone to live with them. Two years later, Lady Georgiana and her husband, Edward Heneage Dering, moved in with Rebecca and Marmion at Baddesley Clinton.

The Quartet were also Catholics, a not-uncommon feature of Baddesley Clinton. The Ferrers family that held the estate had historically been Catholics, and the estate had even been used to shelter Catholics when their presence in England was not legal. The diary of John Henry Newman suggests that Edward Dering, Lady Georgiana, and Rebecca Orpen were received into the Church of Rome in 1865. The Quartet were responsible for the addition of a chapel to the house's first floor, Rebecca providing paintings for it. (In the 1940s, Undine Ferrers, the wife of a distant relative of Marmion, ripped out the shrubbery had added the house, apparently feeling that the dark foliage represented "the dark forces of Catholicism." )

After the foursome had lived together for seven years, Lady Georgiana died in 1876. He left his wife everything that he owned, including the tenancy on Baddesley Clinton until she died. ) thumb Henrietta Georgiana Marcia Lascelles Iremonger (1806–1876), Lady Chatterton (Mrs Edward Heneage Dering) (after Richard Buckner) by Rebecca Dulcibella Orpen (c. 1859)Rebecca Orpen was not a supporter of the suffrage movement. In a letter to Miss Mary Grafton from 1907, the year of the Mud March, Rebecca wrote "Don’t please encourage women[‘s] suffrage! Think what it would be for poor old me!" Unlike some in the period, she did not take a moral objection to suffrage. Instead, she seems to have regarded extending suffrage in the UK as impractical: "I drive to the Poll with a lot of rough people + force my way with the crowd. As it is the carriage has to go all day carrying my tenants as voters to the poll, + if women also, where would end the fatigue and bother. This is a low view to take I know, but one has to consider how things work in practise." 78 of Rebecca Orpen's paintings are known to still survive. Some of her sketches and letters are also had by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.