Lot Details
Lot 710
Roderic OConor Irish, 1860-1940 AUTUMN LANDSCAPE
Irish, 1860-1940
AUTUMN LANDSCAPE
Signed R. O'Conor (lr)
Oil on canvas
21 1/4 x 25 3/4 inches (54 x 65.4 cm.)
Provenance:
Schoneman Galleries, Inc., New York
Having left his homeland of Ireland at a rather young age in order to continue his art studies, Roderic O'Conor arrived in Paris at the time of the last exhibition of the Impressionists. Unaware of the divisions and widening chasm between the various schools of thought emerging from Impressionism, he studied under Emile-Auguste Carolus-Duran. He was taught to paint using the method known as "direct painting", in which form and color are conceived and executed simultaneously, enabling the artist to paint fairly rapidly and with little need for preliminary sketches.
O'Conor soon tired of academia and left Paris for the village of Grez-Sur-Loing, on the edge of the Fontainebleau forest. Here there was a fledgling artist colony established in 1875 by a group of Scandinavian and Irish artists who sought refuge from the spreading industrialization that was changing the face of France. They found solace and inspiration here, in Grez's humble, rural charm.
Already aware of Impressionism during his studies in Paris, O'Conor did not take to it until shortly after his arrival in Grez. His bravura as a young artist and his ability to master Impressionism at the age of twenty-five, in turn inspired many other artists in Grez to embrace the Impressionist style they had once avoided. In all probability, he was the first artist from Ireland or Britain to take to Impressionism.
The subject of this plein air painting is a woodland glade that is enveloped in a silvery mist, with a view of a town, probably Grez, far off in the distance. Here O'Conor chose to emphasize the misty weather conditions that are indigenous to Grez and its environs. Vigorously painted, he applied wet-on-wet layers of paint with both palette knife and brush, creating a richly textured surface evocative of, and with the same virtuosity, as the paintings of Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley, whom O'Conor had recently met during a trip to Moret-sur-Loing. Striking contrasts are created when brilliant yellows and purples when set against the gray of the sky.
O'Conor's early Impressionist works were virtually unknown until the discovery of Autumn Landscape, 1886 (see Jonathan Benington Roderic O'Conor, a Biography with Catalogue of his Work, Dublin, 1992, pl.2.) undoubtedly painted at the same time and locale. Another similar scene painted in Grez in 1887 was Landscape with Road and Farm Buildings (Benington, pl.3).
As he was financially independent, receiving allowances from his family in Ireland, he remained free from the constraints of art dealers, for whom he held much contempt. This is one explanation for his anonymity in the art world until some time after his death, as well as the fact that he did not easily part with his paintings. But it was this same independence which gave him the freedom and confidence to experiment with new art forms. Still rather young, hungry for new challenges and free from the restraints and pressures of dealers, O'Conor's attention turned towards to the more avant garde styles developing out of Impressionism. In 1890 we can already see him experimenting with Pointillism, and in the following months his work developed into a more expressive Post Impressionist style, having recently seen the work of Van Gogh and subsequently moving to Bretagne to paint amongst Gauguin's Pont-Aven Group.
It is in his early Impressionist paintings that we get an understanding of the importance of Roderic O'Conor as one the most significant Irish artists working with Impressionism. In the nearly four years during which he painted in this style, his Impressionist paintings from Grez show the mature eye and hand of an artist who can stand amongst the great French artists of this genre.
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