Roderic O'Conor

The artist's studio, sold Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 7 February 1956;
Roland, Browse & Delbanco, London, 1960s;
David Jones' Art Gallery, Sydney;
Peter Cashell, Queensland;
Private collection

Probably Sydney, David Jones' Art Gallery, Matthew Smith, Roderic O'Conor, 1965, no.19

Jonathan Benington, Roderic O'Conor, A Biography with a Catalogue of his Work, Dublin, 1992, p.198, no.66

The following condition report has been prepared by Hamish Dewar Ltd., London: UNCONDITIONAL AND WITHOUT PREJUDICE Structural Condition The canvas is unlined and is securely attached to the artist's original fixed wooden stretcher. This is ensuring a stable structural support. There are slightly raised stretcher-bar lines corresponding to the central vertical stretcher member. These are stable. There is a stamp of the canvas manufacturer visible on the reverse of the canvas and there is an old label adhered to the reverse of the central vertical stretcher member. Paint Surface The paint surface has an even varnish layer. There are a few fine lines of craquelure within the white pigments of the water. These are entirely stable and are not visually distracting. Inspection under ultra-violet light shows a very small retouching within the red rocks close to the upper part of the right edge, and a few very small spots and lines of retouching within the red pigments towards the lower left corner of the composition. It should be noted that these retouchings are all of minimal size and have been very carefully applied. Summary The painting would therefore appear to be in very good and stable condition.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

'[O'Conor] The most advanced Irish, or for that matter British artist of his generation.'
Dr. Roy Johnston, Roderic O’Conor: Vision and Expression (1996) Dublin, p.19.

Blue Sea and Red Rocks, Brittany dates from Roderic O'Conor's critical 12-year sojourn in Brittany, when he befriended Paul Gauguin and other members of the Pont-Aven School of Artists and painted many of his most important works. The present seascape remained in O'Conor's studio all his life, before passing into an Australian private collection and remaining unseen for half a century.

Finistère (literally ‘End of the Earth’) spans the western tip of the province of Brittany, from Roscoff in the north to Pont-Aven in the south. The further west one goes in Finistère, the wilder the coast becomes. The stretch of coastline O’Conor knew best was that at Le Pouldu, which he first visited in 1892. Six years later he revisited the area and embarked on a series of seascapes, completing at least thirty over a two year period. In preparation for the series he toured some of Brittany's most remote stretches of wild rocky coastline. For example in 1899 he spent several months next to a lighthouse at St. Guénolé in the far west of the province, before moving on in July to the Breton island of Belle-Ile, well known for its huge sea caves and "waves creaming and foaming over the green rocks ... Nature at her biggest and best" (Dorothy Menpes, Brittany, 1905).  

O’Conor was no doubt aware of Claude Monet's visit to Belle-Ile in the autumn of 1886, when he documented the dramatic scenery and fierce storms he witnessed in a series of seascapes. But Monet's paintings were essentially Impressionist in style, whereas O’Conor set out to interpret the material in a less representational way. His depictions of the Breton coastline from the late 1890s broke new ground by relying on broad expanses of pure colour, contrasting the pink, crimson and orange rocks with the complimentary green and blue hues of the sea. In the present work, O'Conor looks down on his subject from an elevated position, allowing him to devote the majority of the canvas to the movements of waves and foam, whilst at the same time excluding the horizon line from his field of view. The vertiginous perspective flattens the composition in a manner akin to that of Japanese woodblock prints.

Here O'Conor recalls Gauguin rather than Monet in his quest for a more progressive rendition of his subject. The Irishman's friendship with Gauguin four years earlier would have acquainted him with works such as The Beach at Le Pouldu (1889), with its broad expanses of bright orange and emerald green likewise signalling a debt to the innovations of the Japanese printmakers. Noticing how this emphasis on two-dimensional design was translated into oil paint at the hands of his friend, O’Conor was motivated to freely abstract the colours he saw in nature. At the same time, in the present work he has truncated the vertical drop between cliff-top and boiling sea, such that the viewer's gaze is drawn directly to the turbulence below. The success of this strategy becomes apparent if one compares the picture with a portrait format view of the same subject, Rising Tide (Benington 1992, no. 64).

O’Conor’s use of expressive brushwork and broad expanses of pure colour were noticed by his fellow painters, including his close friend Armand Seguin. The latter wrote to him in March 1903 urging him to exhibit the entire seascape series: “To return to my first thought and to explain myself better: one of your seascapes, you know from the series I admire, will not do your work justice, but the collecting together of these pictures would demonstrate your research, your burst of energy, declaring your intentions and the new beauty of your art.”

Jonathan Benington