Roderic O'Conor 1860-1940

Acquired from the artist by Francis Chadwick, Grez-sur-Loing;
Thence by descent to his grand-daughter, Corinne Colomb;
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1983

Paris, Salon d'Automne, 1905, no.177;
Pont-Aven, Musée de Pont-Aven, Roderic O'Conor, 1860-1940, 1984, no.35 (illustrated in the catalogue on p.42);
London, Barbican Art Gallery, and tour to Ulster Museum Belfast, National Gallery, Dublin and Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, , Roderic O'Conor, 1860-1940, 1985, no.17 (illustrated in the catalogue on p.20);
Dublin, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Roderic O'Conor - Vision and Expression, 1995-2000, no.6 (illustrated in colour in the catalogue on p.33);
Limerick, Hunt Museum Gallery, Roderic O'Conor, 26 June - 31 August 2003, no.8 

Jonathan Benington, 'From realism to expressionism: the early career of Roderic O'Conor', Apollo, April 1985, pp.253-61 (illustrated); Jonathan Benington, Roderic O'Conor, a Biography with a Catalogue of his Work, Dublin 1992, no.40 (illustrated in colour on p.67, plate 19).

Executed circa 1894.
This important painting by Roderic O'Conor depicts the pathway leading to a group of buildings at Lezaven, a rural location high on the right bank of the River Aven overlooking the Brittany town of Pont-Aven in the northwest of France.

The Lezaven site has special significance in the history and development of the international artists' colony at Pont-Aven. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century these buildings, which were then in poor condition and uninhabited, were used as studios by many of the visiting artists who crowded Pont-Aven in the summer months. Sometimes the artists painted together in groups in the studio, paying the local people to pose for them in their traditional Breton costumes. Artists working there had only a short walk up the hill on the old Concarneau Road as it left the town before making their way along this path to the buildings which are represented by the light tonal area in the upper right of the painting. Because of its privacy and its proximity to the town, the Lezaven manor and its immediate environment appear frequently as subject matter in the work of many of the artists associated with Pont-Aven, including O'Conor and Paul Gauguin.

Much has been written about the friendship between Roderic O'Conor and Paul Gauguin which developed at Pont-Aven in 1894. Gauguin had already made a number of earlier visits to the area and his new ideas about painting led to the formation of a group or circle of artists who were attracted as much by his colourful personality as by his radical theories about art and painting. Gauguin returned to France in 1893 after his first visit to the South Seas. He spent the winter in Paris and travelled once more to Brittany in May of 1894.

Although this work is undated, there is a strong Gauguin influence, especially in the colour range, suggesting that O'Conor probably painted it towards the end of the summer of 1894, after almost daily contact with Gauguin between May and November. Gauguin encouraged the artists in his circle to borrow from nature and to creatively interpret what they saw (see Figs 1 & 2). Although all of the landscape forms in this painting are clearly recognisable as such, they have not been painted in a strictly representational manner. The painting of the undergrowth to the left, for example, and the treatment of the foliage of the trees and their trunks shows an awareness of Gauguin's synthetist approach. Through this he simplified and flattened forms and shapes within his paintings, emphasising the rhythmic and decorative edges which separated them. The way in which O'Conor used the tree trunks as a type of screen to reduce the sense of space within the painting is also a typical Gauguin pictorial device.

The stylistic changes and the Gauguin influences in evidence here are in contrast with O'Conor's vigorously painted landscapes of 1892 and 1893 in which he used elongated and expressive brush strokes derived from van Gogh's approach. The rather schematic interpretation of the forms in L'approche de Lezaven contributes to their somewhat non-naturalistic appearance, and it is likely that in heeding Gauguin's advice O'Conor began his painting from observation and then finished it from memory in the studio.

In many respects L'approche de Lezaven relates very well to Gauguin's recommendations given in a letter to his friend Emile Schuffenecker: "A piece of advice, do not paint too much from nature. Art is an abstraction, borrow it from nature by dreaming in front of it and think more of the creation that will result" (translated from M. Malingue, Lettres de Gauguin à sa femme et à ses amis, Paris 1946. See LXVIII).

Roy Johnston, Ph.D.