Roderic O'Conor: the Irishman who said no to Gauguin
In the spring of 1894 a group of painters, some girlfriends and a pet monkey got into a fight with sailors in the fishing port of Concarneau. Paul Gauguin was thrown to the ground and broke his ankle. One of the painters was a Roscommon man named Roderic O'Conor.
Within a year Gauguin was writing as though O'Conor would be coming with him back to the South Seas. O'Conor did not go. He stayed in Brittany, painted for another forty-five years, sold almost nothing, and died with close to a thousand canvases still in his studio.
Roscommon
He was born on 17 October 1860 at Milton, Co. Roscommon, the second eldest of six, into a landed Catholic family; his father was appointed High Sheriff of the county in 1863. The family moved to Dublin in his childhood. He was schooled at Ampleforth in Yorkshire, where his brother Joseph died of diphtheria when Roderic was fifteen.
He trained at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin between 1879 and 1883 and at the Royal Hibernian Academy schools, then spent a year at the Académie Royale in Antwerp in 1883–4, and finally Paris, in the atelier of Carolus-Duran, around 1886–7. He settled in France about 1887 and, apart from trips home to dispose of inherited land, never lived in Ireland again.
The thing that actually changed him was not Gauguin
Vincent van Gogh died in July 1890. Two months later O'Conor was in Theo van Gogh's Paris apartment looking at a very large body of his brother's work, and he went to the memorial exhibition as well.
What came out of that is the technique he is known for. From about 1892 he began building pictures from thick, parallel bands of unmixed colour laid side by side — red against green, orange fields, striped skies, a whole surface vibrating. The Australian painter Mortimer Menpes called him a “stripist”. It arrives a good twelve years before the Fauves did anything comparable.
Paysage, Pont-Aven of 1892 and the Breton Boy in Profile of 1893 are that method at full strength. The Breton Boy is now in the Musée d'Orsay, which bought it in 2021.
He arrived at Pont-Aven in the winter of 1891–2, before Gauguin got back from Tahiti. The two men met in 1894 and became friends. So the striped pictures are not the result of Gauguin's influence — they predate the friendship. That distinction is worth holding onto, because almost everything written about O'Conor collapses it.
The man with money
He lived at Pension Gloanec and the Hôtel Julia, and at Le Pouldu, in a circle that included Émile Bernard, Armand Séguin, Cuno Amiet, Charles Filiger and Paul Sérusier. Séguin taught him to etch.
He was the one with an income — an allowance from his father, then investments after he sold the Irish land around 1903–4 — in a circle that mostly had none. He spent it on pictures, owning works by Van Gogh, Gauguin and Munch. When Séguin died in 1903, aged thirty-four, tubercular and destitute, O'Conor left Brittany for Paris almost immediately.
In Paris, at the Chat Blanc, he sat among Gerald Kelly, Somerset Maugham, Clive Bell, Arnold Bennett and Roger Fry. Maugham disliked him, called him rude and vile-mannered, said that buying his paintings was frankly insulting him, and put him in Of Human Bondage as the painter Clutton. Bell, marched round the galleries by him in 1921, complained that O'Conor's opinions made one work very hard.
O'Conor's own account of himself, in a letter to Bell, is flatter and sadder: “I have kept the paint going in my usual plodding way very dissatisfied but hoping against hope.”
Cassis, and a very late marriage
He kept a Montparnasse studio for roughly thirty years and his subjects shifted from Breton life to nudes, figures, portraits and still life — Flowers, Bottle and Two Jugs, the interiors, the girl at the mirror.
In 1913 he went south to Cassis, and the colour went up again: La Rose du Ciel, Cassis and Landscape, Cassis are both from that year.
His relationship with Henrietta “Renée” Honta, his model and some thirty-four years his junior, began around 1915. They married in 1933 and moved to Nueil-sur-Layon in Maine-et-Loire. His first solo exhibition — the first, in a fifty-year career — was at the Galerie Bonaparte in Paris in 1937, when he was seventy-six. He died at Nueil-sur-Layon on 18 March 1940, aged seventy-nine.
7 February 1956
The studio was not dispersed at his death. Nearly a thousand works sat there for sixteen years, until the Vente O'Conor at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris on 7 February 1956. The London dealers Roland, Browse and Delbanco took a large block of it. André Breton bought too.
That sale is the reason he exists in art history at all. It put the work into the market, and the market eventually put it into the museums. A touring retrospective opened at the Barbican in 1985 and reached the National Gallery of Ireland in early 1986. Jonathan Benington's catalogue and biography followed in 1992. In 2018 the National Gallery of Ireland gathered more than sixty works for Roderic O'Conor and the Moderns — the largest showing of him in over thirty years. Benington's verdict on the delay was mild and correct: his daring has not been sufficiently recognised in the past.
He did give Ireland something in his lifetime. Une Jeune Bretonne of 1903 is in the Hugh Lane, donated by the artist himself in 1904 and shown by Hugh Lane at the Guildhall in London that year.
Where to see him
The National Gallery of Ireland has The Farm at Lezaven, Finistère of 1894 and Still Life with Apples and Breton Pots. The Hugh Lane has Une Jeune Bretonne — and note that the Self Portrait of 1923 in that collection is by a different man entirely, Roderic Montague O'Connor. Tate has five, including Yellow Landscape of 1892. The Musée d'Orsay has three.
The Roderic O'Conor collection holds the Pont-Aven pictures, the Breton coast and the Cassis light as archival prints, framed or unframed, and the Roderic O'Conor artist page maps the French places that lit up his colour. Every print is open edition and made to order.