RODERIC O'CONOR | BREEZE

Crane Kalman Gallery, London

Michael Fitzsimmons, Dublin

Sale: Phillips, London, November 6, 1990, lot 50, illustrated 

Acquired at the above sale 

Jonathan Benington, Roderic O'Conor: A Biography, with a Catalogue of His Work, Dublin, 1992, p. 197, no. 60

Having embarked on a close and financially supportive relationship with Paul Gauguin at Le Pouldu on the Breton coast in 1894, Roderic O’Conor turned his friend down when invited to accompany him to Tahiti a year later. Following their separation, they kept in contact by letter, whilst the quest for the primitive that had led Gauguin to form an eight-year association with Brittany in turn impelled O’Conor to explore the province more thoroughly. After two land-locked years in the Morbihan district, in 1898 he acquired a Cleveland bicycle and set off to discover the rugged coastline.

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. The further west one went, the wilder the coast became, and piles of enormous blocks of pink granite sometimes rose as high as 20 meters. In 1898, O’Conor revisited Le Pouldu, checking in with his friend Charles Filiger, however he found that the rather tame combination of sheltered beaches and low cliffs at that location no longer satisfied him. His quest for new motifs took him to St. Guénolé in the far west and later to the island of Belle-Ile, where Monet had painted a series of storm-tossed seascapes in 1886 (fig. 1). It may have been Monet’s example that prompted the Irishman to embark on a similar series, in which he contrasted the pink and orange rocks, their colors heightened under his scrutiny, with the vivid greens and blues of the turbulent sea.

The elemental drama played out at these remote locations drew O’Conor back again and again, and he quickly became adept at recreating the rhythmic movements of waves and clouds using highly fluid, gestural strokes of oil paint. On occasion, as in the present work, he would screen out the rocky foreshore from his field of view, in order to focus exclusively on the two horizontal bands of sea and sky, water and air (any human interest in the way of boats or jetties was also edited out). In Breeze, however, O’Conor compensated for the absence of crimson or orange rocks by working swathes of pink and the warm tones of the wooden support into the bank of white clouds amassed above the horizon. The artist used broad, animated brushstrokes to suggest the effects of the sea breeze of the work’s title, while reserving thicker, more viscous paint to convey the driving motion of the sea below.

Renowned as a somewhat reluctant exhibitor, O’Conor showed no paintings between 1899 and 1902. His reappearance in 1903 seems to have been partnered with a desire to catch his public up, not only with his recent creative endeavors but also with works made up to a decade earlier–hence not exhibiting Breeze until seven years after it was painted. The work had the distinction of being one of two Breton seascapes that he entered into the 1905 Salon des Indépendants. The fact that the panel does not bear the atelier O’Conor stamp on its reverse suggests it may have been sold from that exhibition.

This catalogue note was written by Jonathan Benington.