Roderic O'Conor

Paris, Salon des Indépendants, 1905, no. 3103 (the 7^th of 8 entries by O'Conor).

The colours are richer and the surface more textured than the illustration suggests. The panel is sound and is very slightly bowed along the left and right edges. There are old pinholes to the corners and some minor media spots in the bottom left corner, visible in the catalogue illustration, otherwise in good original condition with strong passages of thick impasto throughout. Under ultraviolet light, there are some pigments which flouresce under the signature and some of the orange pigments flouresce however these all appear to be the hand of the artist. There appears to be one small spot of retouching to the centre of the bottom edge. Held in a gilt wood frame. Held in a simple plaster gilt frame.
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O'Conor's work took on renewed impetus in August 1898 with his removal from Rochefort-en-terre, a village in the Breton interior, to his former stamping grounds of Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu. At the latter coastal resort he renewed his friendship with the Swiss Symbolist painter Charles Filiger and, inspired by the exotic hues of Gauguin's Tahitian canvases, he embarked on an experimental series of seascapes. In one sense the pictures enabled him to fulfil the quest for a primitive, unsullied corner of Nature that Gauguin had advocated. And on a more practical level, the turbulent waves and dark crimson and warm ochre rocks of Finistère gave the Irishman full scope for deploying his expressive and vigorous painting technique.

 Coucher de soleil, a newly discovered addition to O'Conor's seascape series, is imbued with the fiery colours and dynamic handling of paint that typified his approach to the subject. Stylistic matters aside, however, it is an unusual composition, for the artist has chosen to adopt the sailor's view of the sea, editing out all vestiges of the land. Thus the juxtaposition of red granite rocks and blue sea that was his usual point of departure in the seascapes has given way to a new source of high-keyed colour - the dome of the western sky as the sun sinks towards the horizon, flushing the scattered clouds with shades of pink, green, turquoise, orange and yellow. Some of these colours are picked up in the foreground waves to the right of the picture, where the artist has employed the same flickering brushstrokes he used in the clouds to represent paler reflections of the aerial pyrotechnics.

O'Conor had to paint swiftly to be able to capture such a fleeting effect, lasting perhaps no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. By working confidently and boldly and avoiding over-painting as much as possible, he succeeded in creating a spontaneous impression that evokes the elemental purity as well as the lyricism of the scene in front of him. That he was pleased with the result is confirmed by his decision to exhibit the picture at the 1905 Salon des Indépendants, just twelve moths after his long association with Brittany had ended.

Jonathan Benington