Roderic O'Conor 1860-1940

Schoneman Gallery, New York;
Private collection, USA 1960;
Private collection

Paris, Salon d'Automne, 1919, no.1419;
Dublin, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Roderic O'Conor, Vision and Expression, 1996 (illustrated in the exhibition catalogue);
Dublin, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Roderic O'Conor Room, 1995 - 2000; 
Limerick, The Hunt Museum, Roderic O'Conor - Shades of a Master, 2003, no.15, as Still life-fruit.

This luminous still life, painted in O'Conor's Montparnasse studio in Paris, conveys an impression of order and calmness and yet it was painted in 1915 at a time when war was raging less than 200 kilometres from Paris.  The outbreak of the First World War had severely disrupted cultural life in Paris and all international and Salon exhibitions were suspended between 1914 and 1918.  The artistic community in Montparnasse became dispersed and many artists enrolled for military service.  The absence of these important annual exhibitions, which in normal circumstances revealed new directions in painting and emerging talents, was keenly felt by those artists who remained in the city.  O'Conor spent more time in his studio and this probably accounts for the greater degree of finish and refinement which he gave to this still life.  The painting was exhibited in the first Salon d'Automne exhibition in 1919 after the end of the war, although it was painted about 4 years earlier.  While there are specific reasons in this case for the interval between the date of the painting and its public exhibition, this was not an unusual practice for O'Conor.  In several salon exhibitions, especially in 1905 and 1906 by which time he was living in Paris, he showed works which he painted in Brittany in earlier years.

The rich colour changes and the manipulation of light in this painting may be interpreted as O'Conor's way of compensating for the depressed atmosphere in the city during the war and the restrictions in travel which made it difficult to access landscape themes.  He recreated in his studio a still life group recalling the same pictorial values of light and colour which feature in most of his paintings and which two years earlier drew him to the Midi where he painted in 1913.  During that year in Cassis he produced a group of richly coloured landscapes in which the contrasts of colour and texture in the landscape reflect the clear and piercing light that is typical of summer in the south of France (see lot 52, Landscape with view over the sea). 

As is usual for O'Conor when painting in the studio from a still life, he placed the group of objects close to the window on a small table below eye level.  This type of arrangement, in which the objects are viewed against the light, was deliberately chosen to heighten the contrasts of both light and colour and to add a sense of drama to what might otherwise be a group of rather mundane objects.  The blue vase with its wide neck appears in a number of other still life pictures and the introduction of lemons, oranges and pears into the composition, fruit associated with the sunny Midi, indicates that in the early years of the war at least such produce was still reaching Paris.

In this composition O'Conor developed a subtle interplay between the oblique lines and geometry of the table edges and those of the window ledge.  Against this he established a vertical stress which runs downwards from the hanging fabric behind the neck of the empty vase and is reinforced by the dark edges of the table on which the objects are sitting.  The brilliant white drapery sweeps the eye into and around the foreground group of fruits, and the curved white edge of the shallow bowl leads us around to the distant group and the solidity of the blue vase.

Roy Johnston Ph.D.