Roderic O'Conor

Sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, Vente O'Conor, 7 February 1956;
Sale, Sotheby's, London, 10 May 1989, no. 85;
Pyms Gallery, London

Paris, Salon des Independants, 1906, no. 3738;
London, Pyms Gallery, Exhibition of Irish Paintings 1860-1960, 1990, with tour to RHA Gallagher Gallery, Dublin.

Kenneth McConkey, A Free Spirit, Irish Art 1860-1960, Antique Collectors' Club in association with Pyms Gallery, London, 1990, pages 112-13, illustrated;
Jonathan Benington, Roderic O'Conor, a biography with a catalogue of his work, Dublin 1992, p. 201, no. 95, illustrated plate 32.

Montigny-sur-Loing is a small town on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, 64 kilometres to the south-west of Paris. In the late nineteenth century, it could easily be reached by train from the capital and was the point of disembarkation for scores of artists, drawn as they were by the combined attractions of forest, river, sunshine and youthful camaraderie. O'Conor first encountered the town in the late 1880s when he spent several seasons painting at nearby Grez-sur-Loing, where Lavery and O'Meara had recently been in residence. O'Conor's fondness for the River Loing was such that he returned to the area at regular intervals, staying with his friend, the American painter Francis Chadwick. The verdant landscape with its meandering river bordered by graceful poplar trees must have provided him with a calm and sheltered oasis after the exposed wildernesses of the Breton coast.

In 1902 O'Conor went to Montigny in the early autumn and was inspired to paint a series of pictures featuring the poplars and the river. Many of these paintings (of which Le soir à Montigny is one of the most expressively charged examples) are concerned with the half-light and the mystery of partially revealed forms.

Le soir was painted mostly, if not entirely out-of-doors, directly in front of the subject. The main areas of the composition were established first using paint thinned with turpentine. This initial ground layer then acted as a foundation for a layer of unthinned paint applied with a loaded brush. The technique allowed O'Conor to work quickly, expressing his feelings with a calligraphic vigour that recalls the late works of Van Gogh. The pulsating 'stripes' of pure colour that dominated O'Conor's landscapes of the early 1890s are echoed here in the parallel strokes of orange and green that have been used to enliven the sky. And just as in the earlier Breton landscapes, the forms of nature are articulated in the river scene by bold arabesques, establishing a pervasive rhythm that binds the separate parts of the picture into a cohesive whole. Ultimately, O'Conor sought to align himself more with the sort of raw, expressive response to Nature practised by Munch and Van Gogh, involving bold mark-making and abstracted colours, than with the more decorative approach attaching to Monet's series of poplars on the River Epte, for example.

An inscription on the back of Le soir à Montigny identifies it as one of seven works that O'Conor exhibited at the 1906 Salon des Indépendants. Although some of the paintings chosen were older pieces, completed up to eight years earlier, it would appear that he deliberately looked for unashamedly modern statements when making his selection. While we can only guess as to his precise motives, it is not unreasonable to assume that he sought to demonstrate that he had anticipated many of the innovations of the Fauves (who were exhibiting alongside him in 1906) in his own boundary-pushing work of the turn of the century. The Fauves, it should be remembered, did not make their mark in public until 1905.

Jonathan Benington