Roderic O'Conor 1860-1940

Roland, Browse & Delbanco, London;
Peter F Scott;
Schoneman Galleries, New York;
Alice and Justin Winter;
Taylor Gallery, London;
Private Collection

London, Roland, Browse & Delbanco, Flowers: Decoration or More?, 1961, no.33;
London, Roland, Browse & Delbanco, Roderic O'Conor, July 1961, no.28.

Jonathan Benington, Roderic O'Conor, a biography with a catalogue of his work, Dublin 1992, no.166, p.210, plate 49.

As a committed colourist, O'Conor never tired of celebrating in his work the chromatic diversity of fresh flowers. He painted the present picture in his Montparnasse studio at 102 Rue du Cherche Midi in May or June 1913. We can be reasonably precise about the date because the flowers depicted - peonies, geraniums and lilac - bloom at that time of year, and a later date is not feasible since it is  known that the artist moved south in the early summer of 1913, spending the rest of the year in sunnier climes.

Here O'Conor has arranged two pots of spring flowers on a tabletop, with a large mirror forming the background. By placing the mirror at right angles to the studio windows it reflects the darker recesses of the room, while its slim profile offers no obstruction to a shaft of bright sunlight that enters the composition from the left. The flowers, as a consequence, are lit up like beacons, the brilliance of their colouring accentuated by the dark reflections in the mirror. The pure vermilion used for the geraniums and the table-edge is particularly potent, complemented and intensified by the green of the foliage.

The high-keyed colours of O’Conor’s exhibits at the 1913 Salon d’Automne in Paris struck the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire as a continuation of ‘the tradition he received from Gauguin’. O’Conor may have left Brittany, and Gauguin may have been dead for ten years, but the lessons the Irishman learnt in the 1890s still impelled him to work in a Fauvist idiom, using colour contrasts to recreate the shimmer and dazzle of sunlight. O’Conor’s friend, the artist Armand Seguin also testified to the same thing when he wrote that ‘what you see first of all is the colours around you’.

O’Conor’s technique in Geraniums and Peonies is bold and painterly, for he had to work quickly to capture the prevailing light effect before it faded. The painter’s brushstrokes range from the staccato marks used to paint the fallen petals and foliage at the bottom left, to the parallel streaks of the mirror-frame (recalling his famous 'striped' method of 1892-4) and the subtle use of thinner paint for the reflected stem of lilac at the far right. This is bravura painting of enormous skill, totally dependant on getting it right first time. That O'Conor felt he had succeeded is confirmed by the fact that he went to the trouble of signing and dating the picture and then inscribing it with its title on the reverse - a system he normally reserved for the small core of works he selected for public exhibition.

Jonathan Benington