Roderic O'Conor 1860-1940

Dominic Milmo-Penny and Daniel Fennely, Roderic O’Conor Private View, Dublin 2001, no.16, p.58, illustrated p.59.

Executed circa 1925.
The Montparnasse studio O'Conor occupied for three decades until 1933 provided him with the stage and backdrop for the majority of his creative output. The subject of the female nude held a particular fascination for him, not least during the 1920s when he adopted a style of expressive realism that can be related to the work of School of Paris painters such as Michel Kikoïne and Dunoyer de Segonzac. There is evidence, in fact, that O’Conor and de Segonzac were friends, and it cannot be coincidence that both men resorted to richly textured paint surfaces built up with the palette knife at this time.

In Montparnasse, O’Conor encountered a very different milieu from the artists’ colonies he had previously participated in at Grez-sur-Loing and Pont-Aven. The Left Bank was more rooted and mutually supportive, with a café network that helped to bring the Irishman many purchasers in the 1920s, including Roger Fry, Somerset Maugham, the Canadian journalist Walter Cranfield and the French State (now in the Musée d'Orsay). In 1924 Roger Fry bought a nude with fashionably bobbed hair direct from O’Conor, on behalf of the Contemporary Art Society (subsequently passed to Derby Art Gallery).

Nude seated on a green rug is one of a group of nudes featuring young women with haircuts, make-up and other attributes typical of the ‘twenties, that O’Conor produced in the middle of the decade. Some of them are clothed whilst others are naked only from the waist up, well known examples being Seated woman in a red dress and Semi-nude model wearing bonnet (Benington 1992, nos. 274 and 234). In these pictures the model is seen from a closer viewpoint than had been O’Conor’s wont in the previous decade, when he tended to show more of the space around the figure. Now the human form dominated the composition, which meant that the drawing and proportions had to be flawless, the modelling accurately observed and the rendering of the flesh tones as truthful and vital as he could make them. The present work, with its sinuous composition, strong lighting and eloquent passages of brushwork (see the model’s thigh, for example) succeeds on all counts. By surrounding the pale figure with dark blue draperies and a crimson and turquoise background, O’Conor emphasises the shapely contours of his young model.

The subject of this painting has previously been identified as the artist’s mistress, Renée Honta. The present writer, however, thinks this unlikely, as the model’s features and hair colour are quite different from those in a securely identified portrait of Honta dating from this period (Seated nude, half length, Benington 1992, no.267).

Jonathan Benington