An Irish Diary

Drawing the line – An Irishman’s Diary on painter Roderic O’Conor

Roderic O’Conor (1860-1940). Self-Portrait, 1903. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland

Jody Moylan
Mon Jul 30 2018 - 00:01

When Roderic O’Conor arrived at Pont-Aven in late 1891, he was following a well-worn path of Irish painters who had used the Breton coast as inspiration for their work. Walter Osborne, Nathaniel Hone and Aloysius O’Kelly had all been part an international set that had been working the region since the 1860s. But unlike most other Irish painters, O’Conor didn’t simply come and go. He waited around and became part of the scene.

His exhibition at the “National Gallery – Roderic O’Conor and the Moderns. Between Paris and Pont-Aven” – gives space to many of his European contemporaries, and puts the Roscommon man in his proper context as an international painter among his brethren.

At Pont-Aven, O’Conor joined a scattering of French, two Dutch, a Pole and a Dane in making up the “Pont-Aven School”. This “school” was, in fact, an eclectic bunch of artists brought together by a new avant-garde approach to painting, known as Synthetism, that had been initiated by Paul Gauguin in 1886. It was, in essence, the pursuit of a subjective form of art that rebelled against more traditional forms, like Naturalism, and even Impressionism. Though he never rigorously conformed to the new movement, Pont-Aven was to be the crucible where O’Conor’s art truly came alive, and where he created some of his finest work.

Having been raised to a young age near the village of Castleplunkett, he was educated in Yorkshire, and became a painter by way of art schools in Dublin, Antwerp and Paris. It was after the latter that he moved to the artists’ colony at Grez-sur-Loing, where he met the likes of John Lavery and Robert Vonnoh.

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Though with a strong Irish tradition – having been founded by Frank O’Meara– the colony at Grez was also the scene of a painful moment for O’Conor, when the secret liaison of his fiancée, Eva Löwstadt, ended his first serious relationship.

Pont-Aven seemed the obvious destination when he decided to move.

In Wladyslawa Jaworska's book Gauguin and the Pont-Aven School, the author notes that those painters were deliberately going into exile "in rustic simplicity to live and work for the realization of advanced ideas". Differing in age, nationality and social background, these artists on the banks of the Aven had art, and its advancement, as their only aim. The village itself resembled a giant outdoor studio, with artists painting en plein air along its small network of picturesque streets. "Nobody came to Pont-Aven in those days excepting painters," wrote the Cork-born Henry Jones Thaddeus, himself a painter who had previously passed through.

O’Conor moved in to the Pension Gloanec on the main promenade, a hostelry that was exclusive to painters, and run in something of a scattershot manner by the longtime landlady. Her goodwill, however, was boundless, with many a penniless artist paying for board and lodging with a painting that might hang on a wall without ever a franc being exchanged.

Thankfully for O’Conor he never relied on such generosities, with his means being buttressed by the Roscommon lands that he was heir to, and that would make him a considerable sum with their sale in 1910. He would never see a friend out of pocket during his time in western France. Charles Filiger and Armand Seguin were two who ultimately died in a tragic state of destitute alcoholism, but not before a great many charitable interventions on O’Conor’s part. It was with the latter that O’Conor enjoyed the summer of 1893, tramping about the neighbouring coastal environs, practising etching and print-making. He was always and ever a critic of his own work, and though Seguin told him he was a natural, O’Conor quickly returned to the bold colours and thick impastos that would, in the end, make his name. These Breton paintings – which covered portraits, still-lifes, landscapes and seascapes – are often noted as being influenced by both Gauguin and Van Gogh.

Indeed, at a time when the great Vincent was hardly known O’Conor had privileged access to his studio, by virtue of a friendship with the artist’s brother, Theo. And yet, though the influences were real, and remain visible, O’Conor in the main preferred to plough his own furrow, experimenting with form, in a ceaseless attempt to attain the impossible heights of a perfectionist. Though harsh on himself, with a deep and enigmatic sensibility, what emerges, as Jaworska has put it, “is an original and attractive personality: an artist, a generous patron, and a discreet and faithful friend”.

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