Roderic O'Conor 1860-1940

Studio of the artist;
Sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, Vente O’Conor, 7 February 1956;
Gerolana Moghini, Lugano, Switzerland;
Sotheby’s, London, 3 November 1982, lot 89, whence purchased by the present owner

Jonathan Benington, Roderic O’Conor, a Biography with a Catalogue of his Work, Dublin 1992, p. 203, no.106.

This girl was a favourite model of the artist. There are at least two other studies of the same sitter (see figs 2 and 3), wearing the distinctive head-dress of Pont-Aven, Brittany, shown here with mourning ribbons. O’Conor lavished a great deal of care over these pictures, knowing that one of them, Une jeune bretonne, would represent him at the Salon d’Automne of 1903 (fig.2). A year later he sent the same picture to the seminal Exhibition of Irish Painters at London’s Guildhall, whence it passed to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin.

Although the Pont-Aven School disbanded after Gauguin's final departure from France in 1895, O'Conor continued his association with Brittany until 1904, staying first at Rochefort-en-terre in Morbihan, before returning to Pont-Aven in 1899.  The massive seasonal migration to the town of tourists and painters did not prevent him from remaining loyal to his old stamping ground.  After a dozen years he still had a great affection for the place, and he maintained his contacts with fellow Pont-Aven School painters Wladyslaw Slewinski, Charles Filiger, Ernest de Chamaillart, Armand Seguin and Paul Sérusier.

Executed circa 1903, Portrait of a Breton Girl, was most likely executed in Pont-Aven during O'Conor's last season in Brittany (1903 - 04), during which he put up at the Hôtel des Voyageurs on the town square, where he had the use of a studio on the third floor in the new annex that the hotel’s owner, Madame Julia Guillou, built in 1900, taking advantage of Pont-Aven’s burgeoning popularity with artists. Here he painted still lifes and a series of portraits of young Breton women wearing local costume which took the place of the outdoor subjects he previously favoured. The identity of the present girl is not known, but she looks to be about fifteen years old, which would mean she was born around the time the artist first became acquainted with Brittany circa 1887. A girl on the threshold of womanhood and of attractive appearance, there is nothing coquettish about her demeanour. The young girl may just been a school girl, glad of the few francs to be earned by sitting for an artist or perhaps she worked as a maid in one of the hostelries such as the Hôtel des Voyageurs where O’Conor was living at this time.

In Portrait of a Breton Girl O’Conor has used a palette of subdued, earthy colours and a dense build-up of pigment to capture the sombre mood of his model. As in Une jeune bretonne she is portrayed half length against a plain background, allowing nothing (not even the back of a chair) to interrupt the figure’s contours or distract from the centrality of the face. There is one significant difference, however, between Portrait of a Breton Girl and Une jeune bretonne: in the former picture, rather than being viewed full face, she is caught in semi-profile, turning and tilting her head to one side so that she looks back at the viewer over her shoulder. It is a less confrontational, more affecting pose, besides being a more natural one.

These portraits of the girl in mourning were amongst the very last Breton paintings to leave O’Conor’s easel, for he left Brittany for good in 1904 when he moved permanently to Paris. As a group they show him adopting a more traditional style than was his wont, spurred on perhaps by a desire to update the great tradition of figure painting stretching back to masters such as Rembrandt. From them, O’Conor would have learnt the virtue of curbing self-expression in order to let the subject speak for itself, in a very direct and honest fashion.

Jonathan Benington