28
WHYTES
SINCE 1783
,
RODERIC O’CONOR (1860-1940)
This group of eleven oil paintings and etchings by Roderic O’Conor spans thirty years of the
artist’s career, encompassing many of his favourite subjects and deploying the entire repertoire of
expressive gestures and marks and the high-keyed palette for which he has become famous. The
collection moves in time as well as place: from the windswept rocky coastline of Finistère in 1893
(see lots 42 & 44), to the shaded, tree-lined roads near Barbizon in 1902, to the life models and
domestic objects of O’Conor’s Parisian studio, and finally to the craggy peaks of the Côte d’Azur.
There is even a work that melds the normally distinct genres of figure and landscape, namely the
lithograph
Two Women in Profile in a Landscape
(lot 42), the descriptive title of which belies its
innovative conception and its boldly simplified forms.
O’Conor’s experimental rigour pervades this entire group of works – he was never a man to go for
the easy option of academic realism. With their impulsive, whipped lines, the four etchings evince
the clash of the elements on the storm-torn coast of Brittany, an alien and barren terrain that
acquires, at the hands of O’Conor, the appearance of a lunar landscape. When he positions the
horizon line lower down the copper plate, he manages to make even the clouds appear tortured.
At this early date (1893), the Irishman was looking to Van Gogh for inspiration, especially the
rhythmic bands of pure colour that energised the Dutchman’s St Remy and Arles landscapes. In
1908 O’Conor would pay verbal tribute to Van Gogh’s paintings as “wonderful examples of
expression of character pushed to the point of hallucination.” Just a few years earlier, on a visit to
Montigny-sur-Loing, he articulated the foliage, sky and grassy bank of his oil painting,
Avenue of
Trees
(lot 39) with alternating stripes of colour, just as he had done a decade earlier in Pont-Aven.
Whilst the predominant mood of these early works might be characterised as controlled anarchy,
at least in the handling of paint, O’Conor was also capable of extracting subtlety and
understatement from his colours. This is nowhere more apparent than in
Chrysanthemums
(lot
38), dating from 1896, when he was rethinking his art in the solitude of the little Breton town of
Rochefort-en-terre. Here the feathery touch and carefully orchestrated colour harmonies (red
predominating) recall no-one so much as Auguste Renoir, who visited Pont-Aven with his family
in 1892 and was eulogised in the exchange of letters between Armand Seguin and O’Conor later
in the decade. Similarly, the way O’Conor contrasts the softly blended brushstrokes describing the
limbs and torso of the nude in
Nu allongé
(lot 37) with a more painterly approach in the
foreground recalls Renoir’s late paintings of bathers.
O’Conor’s affinity for the primitive life Brittany offered sometimes found an echo in pictures from
his early years in Paris. In
Nature morte
(lot 36) of 1909, hand-painted Breton faïence, a white
napkin and some fruit are partnered with an English posset pot, creating a homely assemblage
that recalls, in its carefully articulated geometry, Cézanne’s famous admonition to “treat nature by
means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone.” A few years later in date, the small panel painting
Montagne Sainte-Victoire
(lot 43) demonstrates how the lure of the South, as celebrated in
Cézanne’s landscapes of his native Aix-en-Provence, became too much for O’Conor to resist. Here,
using colour modulations at the expense of detail, he achieves the monumental, notwithstanding
the small scale.
In the years following the WWI, O’Conor continued to paint female models and still lifes, albeit
without returning to the Post-Impressionist idiom of his pre-war years. This new development is
demonstrated to good effect in
Seated Model
(lot 40), where the dramatic transverse lighting and
the use of the palette knife to accentuate the modelling of forms are in keeping with the
methods of the so-called École de Paris – painters such as Dunoyer de Segonzac, Chaïm Soutine
and Maurice de Vlaminck. In the background of O’Conor’s portrait one can just glimpse his cast of
Daumier’s bronze sculpture,
Les emigrants
, as if by way of homage from one dedicated
interpreter of the human clay to another.
Jonathan Benington
February 2013
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