WHYTE'S IMPORTANT IRISH ART 28 November 2022 at 6pm

28 13 Roderic O’Conor (1860-1940) HEAD OF A BRETON BOY, 1893 oil on panel with artist’s studio stamp on reverse 12 by 13in. (30.5 by 33cm) Frame Size: 21 by 22.25in. (53.3 by 56.5cm) Provenance: The Artist’s Studio; Hôtel Drouot, Paris, Vente O’Conor, 7 February 1956; Collection of Mrs Emmet Dalton; Sotheby’s, London, 13 May 2004, lot 58; Private collection Exhibired: Two Masters of Colour: Matthew Smith and Roderic O’Conor’, Roland, Browse & Delbanco, London, 1956, catalogue no. 31; ’Roderic O’Conor’, Browse & Darby, London, 26 October to 26 November 1994 (ex cat.); On loan to the Roderic O’Conor Room, Hugh Lane Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, 1996-2000 Literature: Denys Sutton, Roderic O’Conor, little known member of the Pont-Aven Circle, Studio, November 1960, no. 811, p. 173; Roy Johnston, Roderic O’Conor Vision and Expression, Hugh Lane Gallery of Modern Art, 1996, pp. 30-31 This work was painted around 1893, only a year before O’Conor would befriend Gauguin on his return from his first trip to Tahiti. Brittany for both men was a region largely untouched by industrialisation, proudly independent and with its own distinctive culture, language and religious practices. Its popularity with late nineteenth-century artists stemmed from the cheap rent charged by the local hostelries and from the ready availability of models who would sit in return for modest remuneration, wearing the picturesque local costume that still had everyday currency. For a decade and a half O’Conor never tired of drawing, etching and painting the men, women and children of Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu. His most original figurative works date from the years 1892-94 when he developed his distinctive ‘striped’ application of line and colour, a style that he even extended into the faces and hands of his models. The Irishman’s thickly applied brushstrokes, loaded with unblended colours, were so radical that they can only be compared with the methods of Van Gogh, an artist he was amongst the very first to appreciate. That O’Conor had the ability to relate to children is apparent from Alden Brooks’ recollection of how the Irishman showed him, when a boy, how to catch flies “with a quick side sweep of one’s cupped hand” (letter to Denys Sutton, 12 July 1956). Just a few years later, inspired perhaps by Gauguin’s studies of Breton children, O’Conor completed at least three paintings, one drawing and one lithograph of Breton boys (or gamins, French for urchins). Four of them portrayed the same model, as seen here, a lad of about five or six with a thick head of hair, dressed in a Breton tunic. The boy’s identity is unknown, for the artist never regarded his figure subjects as conventional portraits intended to capture a likeness. Instead, removed from their immediate context and set against neutral backgrounds, their features simplified, O’Conor viewed them as timeless archetypes of peasantry. In the words of his notable contemporary, the writer Alfred Jarry: ’…O’Conor [distils his own version of beauty], the models suggested at siesta-time by local people passing across the triangular public ‘square’- in his case there is a slight disdain towards making a choice at all, his belief being that the painter is outside time and is therefore not concerned with place or space either.’ (Mercure de France, no. 57, 1894) In Head of a Breton Boy, O’Conor posed the model with his face away from the light, averting his eyes and casting most of the features into shadow. The colour range has been limited for the most part to the earthy tones favoured by earlier masters of child peasantry such as Frans Hals (1582/3 - 1666), with whose desire to express the subject’s close relationship with the land he would surely have sympathised. Similarly the brushwork in O’Conor’s painting has a rough tooth to it, a raw energy almost that sweeps through the clothing, neck, face and hair, pushing against the upper edge of the picture. This is particularly noticeable in the whipped contours of the head and the alternating light and dark brown striations used for the hair, as if making a nod to his trademark striping technique. By turning his back on his academic training in favour of a daring new approach to figuration (the boy’s head almost seems sculpted out of oil paint), O’Conor delivers a totally non-sentimental solution. Only the hint of a frown on the boy’s brow yields a sense of sadness and introspection, not out of keeping perhaps with the realities of Breton existence. The lad’s unkempt hair and shadowed features reinforce the sense of ‘other’, no doubt reflecting O’Conor’s awareness that daily life for the Breton peasantry was often primitive and physically demanding when compared to cosmopolitan norms. In July 1895 the features of the same boy (a favourite model surely) were captured in a drawing of O’Conor’s that was reproduced in the fourth issue of the review L’Ymagier, edited by Alfred Jarry. In procuring the image Jarry signalled his high opinion of his friend’s figurative work, whilst O’Conor for his part must have been happy to be represented by one of his earlier studies. Jonathan Benington, October 2022 €60,000-€80,000 (£51,720-£68,970 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot13