Roderic O'Conor

Jean le Corronc, Moulin de Rosmadec, Pont-Aven;
Thence by descent to his daughter Mme Marcelle Le Corronc;
Sale of the Le Corronc Collection, Laurin, Guilloux, Buffetaud, Tailleur, Paris, 30th October 1995, lot 70, where purchased by the present owners

 

Quimper, Musée des Beux-Arts, Gauguin et le Groupe de Pont-Aven, 1950, no. 138;
Pont-Aven, Musée de Pont-Aven, Gauguin et ses Amis, 1961, no. 127;
Pont-Aven, Musée de Pont-Aven, Roderic O'Conor 1860-1940, 30th June - 30th September 1984, no. 19, p. 41, illustrated in the catalogue.

Jonathan Benington, Roderic O'Conor, a Biography with a Catalogue of his Work, Dublin 1992, pp. 194-5, no.43.

Original canvas. There are several small areas of very fine surface craquelure scattered throughout, which appear to be stable; and there are three small spots of paint seperation on the yellow pigments in the lower left, the lower right, and the upper right quadrants. Three small stains are visible near the lower right edge, otherwise in good overall condition with strong passages of impasto throughout. Under ultraviloet light, there are some fine flecks of retouching scattered to the upper left quadrant and a small area at the top of the second tree from the left, there are some further specks of retouching scattered in the upper right quadrant and a small area to the centre of this quadrant, there is a small area of retouching at the base of the tree by the center right edge. There is a small area of retouching beneath the centre of the fence in the bottom left corner and some very minor scattered specks of retouching to the area above the fence. Held in a modern wood box frame.
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Executed circa 1894.
This picture, which was painted in Pont-Aven, probably on the upper fringes of the Bois d'Amour, seems not to have left Brittany until a century after it was painted. The first owner, the sculptor and collector Jean Le Corronc, settled in Pont-Aven in 1905, just a year after O'Conor left the Breton town for Paris. O'Conor's connections with Pont-Aven stretched back to 1891, when the town was already well established as a colony of international artists. It was here that O'Conor would paint many of his most memorable and daring pictures, developing rapidly from an Impressionist into a Post-Impressionist and, in 1894, meeting and befriending Gauguin. These were, indeed, formative years for the only Irish member of the Pont-Aven School of artists.

Shortly after his arrival in Pont-Aven, O'Conor discovered the scenic potential of the Bois d'Amour, a popular beauty spot bordering the banks of the River Aven where the local townspeople would promenade on Sundays dressed in the distinctive regional costume. Inspired no doubt by his fellow painters, O'Conor featured the wood in several etchings and paintings including The Glade (Museum of Modern Art, New York), a seminal work of 1892 in which dappled sunlight similarly breaks through the leafy canopy. He became particularly fond of the quieter upper rides of the wood, where the trees give way to cornfields whence there are panoramic views across to the Colline Ste. Marguerite and down to the town's harbour. This secluded area was surely the setting for the present painting, the only viable alternative being the top of the path leading to the Lezaven manor house, where O'Conor was renting a studio in 1894. On balance, however, Lezaven makes less sense as a setting because the path there is steep and narrow, not broad and level as in the present work.  

O'Conor set himself a challenge with this painting, for it is a contrejour landscape, with the light source facing us rather than being located behind us. This makes for a scene of intense contrast in which the brightness of local colours tend to be either bleached or darkened, whilst forms resolve themselves into flat, simplified planes (the silhouette effect). Knowing that the normal rules of linear and aerial perspective did not apply, O'Conor interpreted the scene as a sequence of parallel planes alternating between sunlight and shade, with a tunnel-like space opening out in the centre. To reinforce the sense of claustrophobic enclosure around the void, he has virtually excluded the sky from the composition.

The receding fence on either side of the picture leads the viewer's gaze into the picture, whilst also serving to contain the luxurious verdure and prevent it from spilling over onto the central footpath. In the distance the path bends to the right under the spreading branches of a tree, a reminder perhaps that Nature is not totally untamed and that there is an implied human presence in this landscape.

The Impressionist sparkle and dazzle of the painting is, however, deceptive, for O'Conor has avoided the broken brushwork and primary colours of his plein air precursors. Instead he has deployed a rich, textured impasto throughout, using flat shades of green to define each compositional zone, and only introducing warmer accents into restricted areas – namely the passages of pink and purple in the foreground, and the streaks of vermilion and blue in the middle distance. These touches of non-naturalistic colour combine with the planar articulation of pictorial space to remind us of the picture's primary existence as a two-dimensional entity (Maurice Denis's "flat surface covered with colours arranged in a certain order"). O'Conor may have avoided the whipped Cloisonnist outlines favoured by Gauguin and Bernard, but in this work he came as close as he ever did to sharing their interest in broad areas of unrelieved colour.

The selective influence of Gauguin on this work suggests that it was completed either during or shortly after the time they spent together in Pont-Aven in 1894. O'Conor was a strong enough personality to avoid becoming a mere disciple. Instead he sought a middle path that allowed him to reconcile the abstraction, exoticism and symbolism of the older painter's work with his own brand of Nature-inspired expressionism.

Jonathan Benington