Roderic O'Conor

Oil on board

Signed top left 'O'Conor 93'

38.1 x 44.5 cm (15 x 17 ½ in.)

Provenance:
Hôtel Drouot, Paris, Vente O'Conor, 7 February 1956; Roland, Browse & Delbanco, London;
Drue Heinz, purchased April 1957.

Exhibition:
Probably Salon des Indépendants, Paris, 1893, no. 962 Gamin; Roland, Browse & Delbanco, London, Roderic O'Conor paintings; collectors' drawings, 19th and 20th century, 1957, n° 17.

Literature:
Jonathan Benington, 'From Realism to Expressionism: the early career of Roderic O'Conor',
Apollo, April 1985, p. 156-7 (reproduced); Jonathan Benington, 'Thoughts on the Roderic O'Conor exhibition', Irish Arts Review, summer 1986, p 57 (repro), 59; Jonathan Benington, Roderic O'Conor, a biography with a catalogue of his work, Dublin 1992, p. 52-3 (repro), 193, n° 32.

After attending Ampleforth College near York, Roderic O'Conor returned to Ireland and studied at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin during 1879-81 and 1882-83. He continued his studies at Antwerp's Académie Royale des Beaux Arts, joining the landscape course under Charles Verlat. In 1886 he settled in Paris and enrolled in the studio of portrait painter Carolus-Duran. The summers of 1889-90 were spent in the artists' colony at Grez-sur-Loing near Fontainebleau, painting impressionist landscapes influenced by Alfred Sisley and Claude Monet. Between 1891 and 1904 he was based in Brittany, joining the Pont-Aven School of painters and meeting Gauguin on his return from Tahiti in 1894. O'Conor lent Gauguin his studio at Pont-Aven after the latter was injured in a fight with local sailors. O'Conor also supported the older artist by purchasing paintings and prints from him.
Following his move to Paris in 1904, O'Conor's role as an enlightened connoisseur of modern art continued in his friendships with Clive Bell and Roger Fry of the Bloomsbury Group, and with the young Matthew Smith. O'Conor now kept a studio in Montparnasse, having sold the lands he inherited in Ireland. Continuing painting and drawing, he devoted less time to landscape subjects, focusing instead on still lifes and pictures of interiors featuring nude and clothed models. He never returned to Ireland and died at his home in the Loire during the Second World War. A distrust of critics and dealers hindered his recognition, and it was only when his private collection was put up for sale at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris in 1956 that his own work began to make an impact. Shortly thereafter the Cork Street dealers Roland, Browse & Delbanco organised the first solo exhibition of his work.
Surveying O'Conor's career, it is clear that the 1890s brought out the best in him. That he should so quickly have become a key member of the Pont-Aven School was a tribute on the one hand to the group's internationalist outlook, and on the other to his own penchant for experimentation. Throughout this era he was drawn to individuals who strove to give new meaning to art, not least Gauguin who made repeated visits to Pont-Aven between 1886 and 1894. It was to O'Conor's credit that he resisted the temptation to pursue the simplified, flattened forms of Gauguin's synthetist style, opting instead for a much more expressive reliance on fauvist colours and painterly gestures.

The year 1893, as experienced by Roderic O'Conor, can be broadly divided into three phases. During the first two months he continued his sojourn in the Breton village of Pont-Aven, accompanied by the French artist Emile Bernard and the Swiss painter Cuno Amiet. O'Conor had struck up a friendship with the latter that evolved into friendly rivalry, each trying to outdo the other in the modernity of their respective paintings. With the coming of spring, O'Conor moved his base to the coastal hamlet of Le Pouldu, 16 miles from Pont-Aven. Here O'Conor embarked on a new alliance, this time with the printmaker Armand Seguin, with whom he shared a studio at St Julien adjacent to the port, where the young Frenchman had installed an etching press. Over the summer both artists captured the features of the local dunes, cliffs, estuary and rolling hinterland in dozens of etchings. This fruitful creative collaboration came to an abrupt end, however, with the death of O'Conor's father, necessitating his departure for Dublin in October so as to settle the estate.

As a work that is signed and dated 1893, Breton Boy in Profile must have been painted either at Pont-Aven or Le Pouldu. The coastal location seems much less likely given O'Conor's preoccupation with printmaking on the one hand, and with landscape subject matter on the other during the seven or so months that he spent in Seguin's company. As a head-and-shoulders study of a child executed in bold primary and secondary colours, it would be much more logical to situate Breton Boy in Profile in the context of the series of oil paintings of Breton peasants that O'Conor and Amiet produced during their 1892-3 association. A dating of the work to January or February of 1893 would also make sense if, as seems likely, it is identical with the painting entitled Gamin (Urchin) that O'Conor exhibited at the ninth exhibition of the Salon des Indépendants, on view in Paris from 18 March of that year.[1]

Whilst Amiet and O'Conor made Breton women and girls wearing the distinctive regional costume the focus of their figurative work, the Irishman was the first to explore male subjects. Men and boys were arguably not as appealing as their female counterparts given that they wore plainer clothes, with the addition only of waistcoats and broad-brimmed hats adorned with ribbons on Sundays and during religious festivals. Perhaps inspired by Gauguin's late 1880s paintings of Breton boys bathing and wrestling, or more likely by Charles Filiger's use of local boys as models for his religious compositions, O'Conor made them the subject of three oil paintings together with a drawing and a lithograph, all dateable to 1892-3. Four of these works depicted the same model, a tousle-haired lad aged about five or six wearing a Breton tunic and sometimes a beret. The present work, however, depicts an older, more mature boy with a snub nose, presented in sharp profile as if to reinforce his independent demeanour. Unfortunately the identities of these lads are unknown, for O'Conor refrained from regarding his figure subjects as portraits. Removed from their surroundings and placed against neutral backgrounds, their features simplified, they became instead timeless archetypes of peasantry, as recognised by the artist's friend, symbolist writer Alfred Jarry: '...Thus : [...] O'Conor 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.'[2]
Of O'Conor's three surviving oil paintings of peasant boys, Breton Boy in Profile is not only the largest but also the most uncompromising in terms of its pictorial style (it is also the only one that is signed and dated). In Head of a Breton Boy the model poses with his face away from the light, averting his eyes and with the main facial features shrouded in shadow.[3] The colour range of this work was restricted to the earthy tones favoured by earlier masters of child peasantry such as Frans Hals, as if to allude to the subject's symbiotic relationship with the land. Likewise the brushwork, though fluent, has been imbued with an expressive vigour that dispels all sentiment. O'Conor brought greater deliberation to his mark-making in Head of a Breton Boy with Cap, where he applied elongated strokes of paint consistently to the face, clothing and background, so as to both model the forms and at the same time create linear surface rhythms throughout the composition.[4] But even here there is a noticeable restraint in the 'striped' gestures, with the exception of the background that has been made to throb with a much bolder banding of green, blue and lilac. Indeed it is this background, rather than the treatment of the head, that sets the tone for the determinedly non-naturalistic approach seen in Breton Boy in Profile.

To create this profile head O'Conor laid vivid complementary colours side by side, making no attempt to soften their impact through blending. Stripes of pink and ochre course diagonally through the highlighted areas of the face, only to change angle and mutate into a brighter pink and green denoting the shaded parts of cheek and neck. The strong diagonal movement continues into the left background, where a pale lilac has been juxtaposed with two shades of green and some touches of red. There is no softening of the treatment in any part of the composition, such that even the boy's hair has been translated into streaks of green, dark brown, reddish brown and ochre. The brush movements and colour choices seem to have been determined by the need on the one hand to achieve a coherent design, and on the other to ensure a visual impact that would be as expressive as it was decorative. Might O'Conor have been suggesting, with this young face positioned halfway between a shadowy interior and a brightly illumined window, that this 'gamin' was at a threshold in his life, relinquishing childhood for a future shaped by adult concerns and responsibilities?

Arguably the most experimental feature of Breton Boy in Profile is the application of thick coloured stripes to the model's face, such that recognisable features are subsumed within the patterning and begin to relinquish their definition. Only one other work by O'Conor, Breton Peasant Woman Knitting (1893), takes the same liberties with the conventions of portraiture, the woman's face having likewise been modelled using bright red and green striations.[5] We might legitimately ask what drove O'Conor, temporarily resident in Pont-Aven, to so drastically set aside everything he had been taught in the art schools and studios of Dublin, Antwerp and Paris concerning the mimetic transcription of the human figure.

The only concession Breton Boy in Profile makes to the synthetist style of Gauguin and the Pont-Aven School is the dark outline the artist used to reinforce the contours of the boy's face and hair. This feature apart, the painting reveals O'Conor's precocious understanding of, and affinity for, the late work of Vincent van Gogh. His appreciation was sparked in September 1890 by attending the posthumous exhibition staged by the painter's art dealing brother, Theo in his Parisian apartment. His knowledge deepened with a visit in April 1892 to the first ever exhibition of Van Gogh's works held in a gallery, that of Le Barc de Boutteville in Rue Le Peletier. O'Conor was fascinated by the expressive brushwork he discovered in Van Gogh's paintings, which he would later describe as 'wonderful expressions of character pushed to the point of hallucination.'[6] On returning to Pont-Aven for the summer and autumn of 1892, O'Conor was shown the residue of the Dutch artist's 1888 exchange of paintings with Gauguin and members of his circle based in the Breton village – two Arles landscapes, namely Thistles (private collection) and The Old Mill (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, New York). Both works were executed with thick calligraphic brushstrokes, some of them arranged in parallel alignment so as to rhythmically animate the picture surface.

Whereas the immediate effect of these encounters with Van Gogh's paintings was born out in O'Conor's landscapes, notably his Yellow Landscape, Pont-Aven (Tate) and The Glade (Museum of Modern Art, New York), six months would elapse before he found a way of grafting his new 'striping' style onto his figure subjects. The catalyst for this step forward may have been Emile Bernard's visit to Pont-Aven lasting from summer 1892 until February 1893, during which he began to edit Van Gogh's correspondence for serial publication.[7] He brought with him the 22 letters written to him by Van Gogh, copying them out neatly and carefully removing personal details. Some contained pen drawings, including a sketch of Van Gogh's painting Sewer with Setting Sun in which the sewer's jacket, face and hat were described solely with diagonal strokes of the pen (New York, Thaw Collection, The Morgan Library & Museum).[8] In January 1893 Bernard wrote from Pont-Aven to Jo van Gogh-Bonger in Holland, requesting the loan of some of Vincent's letters to Theo, to which she promptly agreed.[9] Given Bernard's close friendship with the Dutchman, it seems highly likely that O'Conor would have made a point of questioning him about their association and, furthermore, that he would have seized the opportunity to view the letters in manuscript form.

O'Conor's whole-hearted commitment to an expressive painting style, influenced by Van Gogh but made personal through a consistent rendering of forms using parallel lines, would bring him widespread admiration and a small group of followers within the ranks of the Pont-Aven School. Cuno Amiet's letters reveal the extent to which he was in awe of his friend.[10] Armand Seguin took up the style in many of the etchings he completed during 1893-4. Charles Filiger may have been inspired by the Irishman when he used unblended, bold taches of colour to tint the faces of his gouache portraits. And finally the Englishman Robert Bevan clearly absorbed Van Gogh through the filter of O'Conor's sensibility when he produced a group of lithographed Pont-Aven landscapes executed entirely with rhythmic lines.

Jonathan Benington

[1] Salon des Indépendants, Paris, 1893, no. 962 Gamin.

[2] Alfred Jarry, 'Filiger', Mercure de France, no. 57, September 1894.
[3] Sotheby's, London, The Irish Sale, 18 May 2000, no. 111.
[4] Jonathan Benington and Brendan Rooney, Roderic O'Conor and the Moderns: Between Paris and Pont-Aven, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 2018, 66-7, no. 35.
[5] Benington and Rooney, op. cit., 64-5, no. 34.
[6] Roderic O'Conor to Clive Bell, 18 February 1908, OCCB6, National Gallery of Ireland Archive, Dublin.
[7] Emile Bernard to Andries Bonger, Pont-Aven, 31 December 1892, in Neil McWilliam, ed., Émile Bernard: les lettres d'un artiste, Monts 2012, 204-5.
[8] Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker, Vincent van Gogh – Painted with Words: The Letters to Émile Bernard, New York 2008, 58 and 177, letter 7 written c. 19 June 1888.
[9] Jo van Gogh-Bonger to Émile Bernard, 26 January 1893, Art-Documents, no. 17, 1952.
[10] Extracts from the letters referring to O'Conor are quoted in Claude Ritschard, Cuno Amiet: de Pont-Aven à die Brücke, exh. cat., Geneva 2000, 18-19.