Roderic O'Conor 1860-1940

The Artist's Studio;
Sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, Vente O’Conor, 7th February 1956;
Felix Wolmark, Paris;
Sale, Sotheby’s, London, 2nd July 1969, lot 121 (as Portrait de Bretonne);
Acquired by the present owner in April 1982.

Paris, Grand Palais, De Pont-Aven aux Nabis, Retrospective 1888-1903 (Société des Artistes Indépendants, 82e Exposition Annuelle), 1971, no.67;
Pont-Aven, Musée de Pont-Aven, Roderic O’Conor, 1860-1940, 1984, p.164, no.17, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue.

Richard Shone, The Post-Impressionists, Octopus Books, 1979, p.164, illustrated;
Jonathan Benington, Roderic O'Conor, A Biography with a Catalogue of his Work, Dublin, 1992, p.195, no.46.

This sensitive portrait of a young Breton girl was publicly exhibited for the first time in Paris in 1971 at the Grand Palais in the important survey exhibition, Retrospective de Pont-Aven aux Nabis, 1888-1903, when it was shown under the title Jeune Bretonne. The exhibition included paintings by Gauguin, Bernard, Serusier, Filiger, Seguin, Slewinski, Denis, Ranson and others.

The girl is wearing an embroidered coiffe which sits close to the crown of her head and is covered by a light cotton or muslin bonnet.  The style of this coiffe identifies her as a resident of Rochefort-en-Terre in Morbihan in western France.   Rochefort was then, and still is today, a quaint and picturesque village with numerous stone houses somewhat off the beaten track, about 110 kilometers to the southeast of Pont-Aven and approximately  30 kilometers from the coast at Vannes.  O'Conor moved from Pont-Aven, where he had been based since 1891, to Rochefort in the spring or early in the summer of 1895.  By July of that year he was in residence in the village at the Hotel Lecadre.  The hotel’s owner, Francois Lecadre,  was sympathetic to the needs of artists, and the charges he made for board and lodging were modest and affordable.  O'Conor's room in the hotel probably also served as his studio and this is the most likely site for this portrait.

 O’Conor probably chose to make the move to Rochefort from Pont-Aven in pursuit of greater privacy in a quieter location. The environment there attracted fewer artists and was quite different from Pont-Aven, where the colony was excessively crowded.  This was especially true during the summer months when artists of all types travelled down from Paris to take advantage of cheap accommodation and easy access to landscape and seascape motifs.   Between May and November of 1894 O’Conor had worked alongside Gauguin in Pont-Aven and had developed a close friendship with him and the members of his artistic circle.  Gauguin's departure from Brittany in November of 1894 precipitated the dissolution of his group as each one of them moved to different locations.  From what we know of O'Conor's personality he would not have welcomed a role in Pont-Aven which would have attracted the attention of other artists, especially those for whom he had little respect, simply on the basis of his close friendship with Gauguin.  After O'Conor attended Gauguin's sale in Paris in February of 1895, Rochefort must have seemed the better choice for him, and the evidence from the paintings which he made there would indicate that this also  became a period of reassessment for him.  In the comparative isolation of Rochefort-en-Terre, his work returned to more academic values such as those represented in this painting.

Jeune Bretonne is  a very good example of those changes in O'Conor's painting style which are in contrast with his rather more expressive landscapes and portraits of a year or two earlier.  The assured drawing of the figure and the head confirms his skill as a draughtsman, and the portrait also shows his maturity and control in handling paint and in drawing directly with the brush to establish form.  In painting the girl's head he has used left to right brush strokes and simplified the planar structures of her face, acknowledging an obvious debt to Cezanne's way of painting.  His overpainting with brush lines and bold marks in the wide bouffant sleeves of the girl's dress makes a positive reference to his striping technique of a few years earlier.  The same girl may have sat for him on other occasions as both the traditional dress and coiffe which she is wearing are very similar to those in his painting La Jeune Bretonne (Coll. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin).

Roy Johnston, Ph.D.