Roderic O'Conor 1860-1940

Crane Kalman, London;
Christie’s, London, The Irish Sale, 9 May 1996, lot 89;
Milmo-Penny Fine Art, Dublin;
Private Collection

Dominic Milmo-Penny and Daniel Fennely, Roderic O’Conor Private View, Dublin 2001, no.10 (as Girl in a white blouse), p.46, illustrated p.47.

Despite the cavernous proportions of O’Conor’s studio, which was described by a contemporary as “a great big barn of a place”, he repeatedly arranged his models and studio props in such a way as to create the feeling of a domestic interior. In A Quiet Read, the air of relaxed informality was achieved by seating the model close to the studio door and adjacent wall (simply adorned with a plate and a picture), and then cropping the top of the doorframe to give the illusion of a low-ceilinged room. The plain colours and comfortable cut of the model’s blouse and skirt reinforce the homely ambience, likewise the book that she has been reading, now lying abandoned on her lap as she takes a nap.

The style of the woman’s clothing suggests that the picture was painted before the outbreak of the First World War. During his intimiste period of 1905-11, O’Conor produced many studies of women wearing white chemises, applying his colours unthinned and with the sort of restrained, scumbled brushstrokes that yield the chalky textures we see here. These pictures are further characterised by their radiant light and the warmth of their colours. In A Quiet Read there is a subtle, though quite deliberate progression from the reds and pinks in the lower half of the picture, through to the cool pastel shades, the greys and the whites in the upper half. The carefully judged colour harmonies even extend to the linked yellow highlights of the metal belt buckle and the brass fingerplate on the door.

Although the model is unidentified, her simple, loose attire is similar to the clothes worn by the models of the Bloomsbury Group of artists as well as the women who posed for Gwen and Augustus John. O’Conor’s good friend, the art critic Clive Bell, kept him informed of Augustus John’s steadily growing reputation in the years leading up to the First World War. In a letter to Bell dating from the autumn of 1909, O’Conor demonstrated what a small world he moved within as an avant garde painter when he wrote: “I have had a girl posing for me who has worked a good deal for John so have been hearing of him” (OCCB10, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin). As John had recently spent two years in voluntary exile in Paris, it is interesting to speculate as to whether the girl referred to in the letter could in fact be the model depicted here.

Jonathan Benington