Roderic O'Conor 1860-1940

Sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, Vente O'Conor, 7th February 1956
Mrs Emmet Dalton
Private collection, on loan to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, 1995-2000

London, Roland, Browse & Delbanco, Two Masters of Colour: Matthew Smith & Roderic O'Conor, 1956, no.31 (as Breton Boy);
London, Browse & Darby, Roderic O'Conor, 1994, ex-catalogue;
Dublin, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, The O'Conor Room, loan exhibit, 1996-2000.

This work was painted circa 1893. One of the main attractions of Brittany as a place to paint at the end of the 19^th century was the availability of models who were prepared to sit in return for modest remuneration, wearing picturesque local costume that still had everyday currency. Between 1891 and 1904, O’Conor took advantage of this in his numerous depictions of the men, women and children of Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu. His most expressive and original figurative works were completed in the early years of his sojourn in Brittany, between 1892 and 1894, the years which saw him develop a ‘striped’ application of line and colour that would extend, at its most extreme, to the faces of his models.

O’Conor executed at least three paintings, one drawing and one lithograph of Breton boys (or gamins, as he titled them) during the period 1892-4. All but one of these depicted the same model, as seen here, a tousle-haired lad of about five or six wearing a Breton tunic, and sometimes a beret. The identity of the boy is not known, for the artist never regarded his figure subjects as portraits in the conventional sense of the word. Removed from their surroundings and placed in neutral backgrounds, their features simplified, they became instead timeless archetypes of peasantry, as recognised by the artist’s friend, 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 this 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 or either’ (in Mercure de France, no. 57, 1984).

In Head of a Breton Boy, O’Conor has posed the boy with his face away from the light, averting his eyes and casting the main features of the face into shadow. The colour range is restricted quite deliberately to the earthy tones favoured by earlier masters of child peasantry such as Frans Hal, in sympathy perhaps with their desire to express the subject’s symbiotic relationship with the land. Likewise the brushwork in O’Conor’s picture, though fluent, has rough edge to it, an expressive vigour that belies the small scale of the picture. This is particularly apparent in the whipped Cloisonniste contours of the head, as well as the alternating light and dark brown striations used to paint the hair – a partial deployment of the artist’s striping technique.

It is a completely unsentimentalised characterisation that O’Conor gives us, tinged with a hint of sadness and introspection as found in many of his Breton figure subjects. Here, though, the melancholy is perhaps more affecting due to the very young age of the model.

In July 1895, the features of the same boy were disseminated widely through the publication of one of O’Conor’s drawings of him in the fourth issue of the review L’Ymagier, edited by Alfred Jarry. The selection of the image signalled not only Jarry’s high opinion of his friend’s figure subjects, but also the Irishman’s own seal of approval in that it was one of these studies that he chose to resurrect for this important purpose.

We are very grateful to Jonathan Benington for his cataloguing of this lot.