Roderic O'Conor

Hôtel Drouot, Paris, Vente O’Conor, 6 February 1956;
Roland, Browse and Delbanco, London;
The Piccadilly Gallery, London, where purchased by the previous owner in July 1961 and thence by descent to the present owner

London, Roland, Browse & Delbanco, Roderic O’Conor, July 1961, no.24, illustrated.

Jonathan Benington, Roderic O’Conor, a Biography with a Catalogue of his Work, Dublin,  1992, p.82, fig.26, and pp.196-7, no.57.

The following condition report has been prepared by Hamish Dewar Ltd, London, SW1Y 6BU: UNCONDITIONAL AND WITHOUT PREJUDICE Structural Condition The canvas is unlined on the original fixed wooden stretcher. There is a canvas maker's stamp on the reverse of the canvas. Paint surface The paint surface has a reasonably even but discoloured varnish layer and should Respond very well to cleaning. I would be confident of a worthwhile colour change. The discoloured varnish is particularly noticeable in the thick applied pale impasto. Inspection under ultra-violet light shows just a few very small scattered retouchings. Summary The painting would therefore appear to be in very good and stable condition and should benefit considerably from cleaning and revarnishing.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Red Rocks and Sea is imbued with the same passion for the untamed forces of nature as the other works in the extended series of seascapes that O’Conor painted in the closing years of the nineteenth century. The present work is one of the largest, most fully resolved and impressive of the series. Last seen in 1961, the painting has only had two owners since it left the artist’s studio. The fiery colours of the rocks – comprising washes and pulsing bands of pink, purple, red, orange, green, turquoise and blue – are set off against a violet, green and white sea, with a band of grey and pale green sky above. The highly painterly style, characteristic of the series, is extended here to the swathes of white foam that penetrate and frame the outcrops of rock.

Finistère (literally ‘End of the Earth’) spans the western tip of the province of Brittany, from Roscoff in the north to Quimper and Pont-Aven in the south. It is where the Breton language has clung on most tenaciously. The further west one goes in Finistère, the wilder the coast becomes. Piles of enormous blocks of pink granite sometimes rise as much as 20 metres, as at Ploumanach and Trégastel. The stretch of coastline with which O’Conor was most familiar was that at Le Pouldu, the coastal outpost of the Pont-Aven School of painters, which he first visited in 1892. The year 1894 saw O’Conor returning to Pont-Aven and meeting and befriending Gauguin, who had recently returned from his first visit to the South Seas.

In August 1898, O’Conor revisited Le Pouldu and embarked on a series of seascapes, completing at least thirty over a two year period. As part of his preparation for the series he toured the region’s more remote stretches of wild, rocky coastline. In 1899 he spent several months next to a lighthouse at St. Guénolé in the far west of Brittany, before moving on in July to the island of Belle-Ile.    

O’Conor was no doubt conscious of the fact that Monet had visited Belle-Ile in the autumn of 1886, resulting in a series of pictures documenting the dramatic scenery and fierce storms he witnessed. But the work produced by Monet was Impressionist in style, giving O’Conor scope to interpret the material in a less representational way. His seascapes of the late 1890s broke new ground by relying on broad expanses of pure colour, contrasting the warm hues of the rocks with the complimentary greens and blues of the sea.

Whilst O’Conor’s ambition to undertake a clearly focused series of pictures was indebted to Monet, he looked to Gauguin to provide a precedent for applying a more abstract methodology. The French painter’s use of exotic colours and flattened picture space, as seen in works such as The Beach at Le Pouldu (1889), with its bright orange sand and emerald green sea, gave O’Conor the license he needed to heighten the colours he saw in nature. Gauguin might have left France for good in 1895, but his legacy lived on amongst the Pont-Aven School painters. Indeed, O’Conor’s bold use of colour recalls the lesson given by Gauguin to Sérusier in October 1888, when he admonished him to use the purest blues and greens on his palette to paint his small landscape, The Talisman.

O’Conor’s penchant for pushing the expressive language of colour above and beyond its normal limits was noticed by his fellow painters, not least by his close friend, the artist Armand Seguin who wrote to him in March 1903 urging him to exhibit the entire seascape series en bloc:

To return to my first thought and to explain myself better: one of your seascapes, you know from the series I admire, will not do your work justice, but the collecting together of these pictures would demonstrate your research, your burst of energy, declaring your intentions and the new beauty of your art.

The example set by Gauguin and Sérusier notwithstanding, O’Conor never felt obliged to follow the party line. Rather than subscribe to the Synthetist method of applying flat areas of vivid colour to forms circumscribed by bold outlines, he chose instead to energise the entire paint surface with distinct, ribbon-like marks, paralleling the ebb and flow of his subject. He was drawn first and foremost by the primal clash of the elements – wind, sea, rocks, light – and a desire to find an equivalent for it in paint. Thus his handling of the oil medium in this period acquired ever greater fluency, mixing the use of heavily charged brushes and palette knives with thinly stained areas applied with a rag, as seen in Red Rocks and Sea. This all-over dynamism seems to meld the innovations of the opposing systems represented by Gauguin and Van Gogh (memory and symbol versus a more emotionally charged response), resulting in an expressionist formula that is very much O’Conor’s own.     

We are grateful to Jonathan Benington for kindly preparing this catalogue entry.