Roderic O'Conor

Sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, Vente O'Conor, 7 February 1956;
Monsieur de Monbertrand

Paris, Salon des Indépendants, 1892, as one of five works titled 'En Bretagne' (nos. 843-847).

Original canvas. There is some minor surface dirt and some very minor fine lines of surface craquelure to the top of the hill in the centre otherwise in excellent overall condition with strong passages of toothpaste impasto throughout. Under ultraviolet light, there are some minor areas of retouching along the bottom edge and a small line of retouching in the upper left corner. Held in a plaster gilt frame.
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Roderic O'Conor painted the most original works of his fifty year career between 1892 and 1894, using the picturesque Breton market town of Pont-Aven as his base. In 1956 these daringly 'striped' pictures were exhibited posthumously in the first ever solo show dedicated to O'Conor. The canvases made an immediate impact, with major galleries such as the Tate and the Museum of Modern Art in New York moving swiftly to secure works executed in 1892 for their collections. Paysage, Pont-Aven, however, disappeared quietly into a French private collection and did not find its way to London for another 45 years. Its re-emergence confirms its status as one of the artist's key Breton landscapes, for the inscription on the back tells us it was shown at the 1892 Salon des Indépendants in Paris, where it must have underlined O'Conor's avant garde credentials.

The subject is the Colline Sainte Marguerite, one of two well known hills straddling the valley in which Pont-Aven lies (see fig.1). The setting was described by Daniel Henry Blackburn in 1884 as follows:

"The views in the neighbourhood of Pont-Aven are beautiful, and the cool avenues of beeches and chestnut trees, a distinctive feature of the country, extend for miles. From one of these avenues, on the high ground leading to an ancient chapel, there is a view over the village where we can trace the windings of the river far away towards the sea, and where the white sails of the fishing-boats seem to pass between the trees. The sides of the valley are grey with rocks, and the fields slope gently down to the slate roofs of the cottages built by the streams..."

O'Conor's vantage point for the picture was the sloping ground just above the Bois d'Amour (the same hill also appears in O'Conor's Yellow Landscape, Pont-Aven of 1892 (fig.2, Tate Collection, London) and Gauguin's The Aven of 1888 (fig.3, Coll. Bridgestone Museum, Tokyo). In O'Conor's view, we see the swollen mass of the hill broken up by its radial patchwork of fields, and bordered at its foot by the echoing curve of the fast-flowing River Aven (from which the adjoining town derives its name). Mill buildings are visible to the right of O'Conor's composition, located on both banks, while the billowing cloud of smoke near the centre may be emanating from a timberyard. These industrial intrusions serve as a reminder of the fact that late 19^th-century Pont-Aven was opening itself up to progress.

The title on the back of Paysage, Pont-Aven enables us to date it very accurately, just a month or two in advance of its exhibition in Paris in March 1892. O'Conor must have started painting it on one of the short winter days of January or early February, no doubt welcoming the change from the indoor subjects of still lifes and old Breton fishermen that the inclement weather had obliged him to tackle. The painting is, therefore, not only one of O'Conor's earliest 'striped' pictures, but can also lay claim to being his earliest extant Pont-Aven landscape. And it is absolutely typical of the former resident of the Grez-sur-Loing artists' colony that he should once again pursue his search for landscape motifs on the periphery of the settlement, thereby ensuring both privacy and the avoidance of subjects that could be construed as clichéd.

To fully appreciate the startling modernity of O'Conor's 1892 paintings one has to remember that he did not join the School of Pont-Aven until 1891, by which date the School had already witnessed the end of its first great period of innovative activity. Gauguin had left Brittany in November 1890 and was not to return until April 1894. On a personal level, O'Conor may have regretted the absence of the School's leader, of whom he must have heard many tales. On an artistic level, however, the distance between the two painters was to prove liberating for O'Conor, for it meant that he did not come under any pressure to conform with the prevailing Synthetist style of strong outlines and flattened forms. Instead, the young Irishman was at liberty to experiment with alternative modes of expression, without incurring any risk of the master's disapproval.

Determined to make a mark, O'Conor took a very brave and bold step forwards in allowing himself to be influenced by the late landscapes of Van Gogh, painted in 1888-90, during the last two years of the latter's life. Such a step would have been regarded as heresy if taken by one of Gauguin's true disciples, but at this point in his career O'Conor clearly preferred the pulsating rhythms and thick paint of the Dutchman's passionate work to the more abstract and imaginary take on reality promulgated by the Frenchman. We cannot be certain where O'Conor first encountered Van Gogh's paintings, but one account suggests that it was a private viewing in the Paris apartment of Theo Van Gogh, brokered by O'Conor's American friend, Edward Brooks. The absence of precise details is of secondary importance, however, to the fact that paintings such as Paysage, Pont-Aven show O'Conor to have been one of the very first English-speaking painters to have fully appreciated and understood Van Gogh's work. He was, in fact, over a decade ahead of the painters and critics of the Bloomsbury and Camden Town circles.

The range of colours used in Paysage, Pont-Aven - with its predominance of purple, green, light blue and ochre - is very similar to that seen in O'Conor's Still Life with Bottles of 1892 in the Tate Gallery. But there the similarities end, for the tentative brushstrokes and smooth paint surface of the still life are replaced in the landscape with a much rawer, more energetic response. Having to paint the work outdoors in the cold undoubtedly contributed to this rougher tooth, suggesting that the radical stylistic experimentation we see here was driven more by instinct and feeling than by pre-planning. In many areas of the picture the brushstrokes have begun to be aligned into stripes of alternating colours, so that the picture effectively represents an intermediate step between the shorter, thinner streaks of paint seen in the still lifes, and the much thicker, more attenuated and mannered brushstrokes of the yellow landscapes he would paint in the summer. The unique style that O'Conor emerged with after six months placed him in the vanguard not just of the Pont-Aven School, but of late 19^th-century European modernists.

Jonathan Benington