IMPORTANT IRISH ART Monday 23 November 2026 from 6PM

22 9 Roderic O’Conor (1860-1940) SEASCAPE WITH SUNSET, c.1898 oil on canvas inscribed on reverse 25.50 by 21.50in. (64.8 by 54.6cm) Frame Size: 31 by 28in. (78.7 by 71.1cm) Provenance: Christie’s, London, 12 May 2005, lot 14; Private collection; Bonhams, 18 November 2014, lot 142; Private collection By May 1898 O’Conor had moved his base from Rochefort-en-terre in the Breton interior in order to revisit his former haunts of Le Pouldu and Pont-Aven. He was about to embark on an ambitious series of Breton seascapes inspired by Finistère’s wild, rocky coastline, which he thoroughly explored on his Cleveland bicycle. The terrain he sought out was famed not only for its stormy seas but also for its distinctive pink granite and red sandstone rocks, some of which were as high as twenty metres. The primal clash of the elements - wind, sea, rocks and light - played out at these remote locations drew O’Conor back repeatedly, prompting him to seek an equivalent for it in paint. The resultant creative outpouring reaffirmed his avant garde credentials. He deployed bold brushwork and intense colours to capture the rhythmic energy of waves and clouds, as if his paint handling had been energised by the ebb and flow of his subject. He typically used a mix of heavily charged brushstrokes, palette knife work and thinly stained areas of paint applied with a rag. This all-over dynamism was indebted to the joint legacies of Gauguin and Van Gogh: memory and symbol from the former, and a more emotionally charged response from the latter, resulting in an expressionist formula that was personal to the painter from Roscommon. In a letter to his close friend O’Conor, dating from May 1899, Armand Seguin responded enthusiastically to the new lease of energy that had had enabled him to produce some two dozen seascapes in little more than a year: ’… you must have had a wonderful spectacle this month if the storms in Paris were anything to go by …What pleases me particularly - and here I agree with you entirely - is that you have worked hard on these canvases and given them your all. … I am envious of your love and I by no means doubt your great success at the time of your choosing …Your exhibition would do a lot of good amidst all the rubbish we see.’ The ‘love’ that Seguin referred to was surely O’Conor’s romantic preference for lonely locations where the forces of nature were unleashed. He would have been aware of the series of storm-tossed seascapes painted by Monet on the Breton island of Belle-Ile in 1886. The Irishman similarly studied the way the angry sea pounded the coast, churning itself into whirlpools of foam and spindrift. Sometimes he was moved to paint just an expanse of sea and sky, eliminating the foreground so as to create a greater sense of immediacy, not unlike the approach of Gustave le Gray in certain of his photographs of the Normandy coast (1856-57). In the present work, Seascape with Sunset, the view O’Conor has adopted seems to be from a boat rather than from the shoreline. Here the sky dominates the composition, flushed with swathes of pink, green and yellow, exaggerating the local colours of the scene, which are then echoed by the vivid reflections in the troughs of the waves below. O’Conor’s expressionist brushstrokes, less mimetic than those of Monet, were applied quickly and boldly, driven no doubt by the rapidly changing light effects as the sun dipped towards the horizon. What emerged from this process was a fauve painting - one that pushes observed reality, as filtered through the artist’s perceptions, towards a solution that anticipates the innovations of Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck six years later. Scientific analysis of the pigments used in this painting revealed that the green parts of the sky were executed using emerald green (copper arsenite) - a pigment that occurs in other Breton works by O’Conor. This colour became obsolete in the early 1900s because of its toxicity. Jonathan Benington, October 2026 €30,000-€40,000 (£25,210-£33,610 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot9