Irish Art

Irish Art

View full screen - View 1 of Lot 65. RODERIC O'CONOR | A FIGURE RECLINING ON A COUCH.

RODERIC O'CONOR | A FIGURE RECLINING ON A COUCH

Auction Closed

November 19, 03:20 PM GMT

Estimate

20,000 - 30,000 GBP

Lot Details

Description

RODERIC O'CONOR

1860-1940

A FIGURE RECLINING ON A COUCH


stamped verso: atelier O'CONOR

oil on canvas

54 by 63.5cm., 21¼ by 25in.

Painted circa 1909-10.

Hotel Drouot, Paris, Vent O'Conor, 7 February 1956;

Blache, Versailles, 9 March 1975, no.114;

Christie's and Hamilton & Hamilton Ltd., Castletown House, Co. Kildare, 29 May 1980, no.125;

The Oriel Gallery, Dublin, where purchased by the present owner in 1981

Jonathan Benington, Roderic O'Conor, Dublin, 1992, no.138, p.206-7 

The present work is one of three surviving variations of the same subject, and the only one in which the model's right arm is not tucked beneath her head. The table in the background supporting a wine bottle and glasses seems to suggest a narrative, as if the artist wants us to believe that the young woman has succumbed to a drink-induced slumber. Such use of functional still life objects in a figure painting by O'Conor is unusual. Although open to interpretation, the subject may have sprung from an admiration for the sort of gritty social realism practised by Toulouse Lautrec, whose prints the Irishman avidly collected. 


The picture has been painted with great speed and confidence. The technique makes extensive use of linear strokes of the brush, deployed both as outlines and as an abbreviated form of shading. The parallel vertical strokes in the background are an echo of O’Conor’s famous ‘striped’ technique of fifteen years earlier, as is the dramatic juxtaposition of large areas of the complimentary colours, green and red. It could well be the case that this is a transitional work, painted within a few years of the artist’s move in 1904 from rural Pont-Aven to cosmopolitan Paris.


Jonathan Benington