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William Conor OBE RHA RUA ROI (1881-1968)
DOCKERS, c.1920s
crayon and pastel on buff-coloured card
signed lower right
22 by 27in. (55.88 by 68.58cm)
Provenance:
Emer Gallery, Belfast;
Where purchased by the present owner
In the 1920s William Conor was a member of the Dublin Painters’ Society
and held one-man shows there in 1924 and 1925. This picture, with its
prominent tricolour fag fying in the background, may date from those
years. Certainly the subject matter and its handling, with its evident debt
to Conor’s early work as a lithographer in David Allen & Sons in Belfast, are
characteristic of the artist’s mature style, which compels one to read the
image in almost purely malerisch terms. Conor’s view of art was that the
artist should interpret ‘his own epoch and give expression to that which is
happening around him’, as Máirín Allen recorded (‘Contemporary Irish
Artists XIV, William Conor’, Father Mathew Record, October 1942).
Some years later, writing in the catalogue of Conor’s retrospective
exhibition at the Belfast Museum & Art Gallery (later Ulster Museum) in
1957, John Hewitt, who at the time was Keeper of Art at the Museum, saw
Conor ‘placed with Paul Henry and Jack B. Yeats, as one of the frst to
record the life of the people in painterly terms, without the trappings of
stage-Irishry.’ George Russell (Æ) in the 1920s also saw him as ‘a Belfast
counterpart to Jack Yeats’ (Irish Statesman, 3 May 1924, p. 242). Conor,
Hewitt noted, ‘was the frst exponent of the same kind of material Sean
O’Casey used in his Juno period; without the political passion or the tragic
sense, but with as warm a humanity and as kindly an eye.’ As Hewitt
detected, Dockers is rich in its suggestion of observation, character and
dialogue among those depicted drinking by the Dublin docks. Yet, too, as
with O’Casey there is in their jollity a sense of the tragic stasis of the times
in Ireland. Commenting on the characteristics of art such as Conor’s,
Kenneth Clark said that it always ‘tells a story, takes pleasure in facts, is
lyrical and achieves a visionary intensity.’ Dockers well illustrates his
thoughts.
Dr. S.B. Kennedy
April, 2012
€25,000-€35,000 (£20,491-£28,688 approx).