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Artist or Maker: Roderic O'Conor (1860-1940)
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Provenance: with Schoneman Galleries, New York.
Marguerite Dorment, New York.
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Exhibited: (Possibly) Paris, Salon des Indépendants, March - April 1890, no. 561 as 'La mare, effet de soleil, midi'.
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Notes: Three of the six surviving Impressionist canvases by O'Conor feature bodies of water. This beautiful rediscovered addition to the series depicts a tree-lined grassy path or bank that recedes sharply into the distance, bounded on both sides by stretches of water. The predominant colours, purple and yellow, are complementary hues that O'Conor has deliberately juxtaposed in accordance with Impressionist colour theory. In other canvases of the late 1880s he used a palette of brilliant unmixed red, orange and yellow to convey the radiant heat and light of full summer. By way of contrast, Autumn Landscape depicts cooler, shadier weather conditions, and the artist looks into the light rather than having his back to the sun.
The titles of the pictures O'Conor exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1889 and 1890 reveal how the time of day when a picture was painted and the nature of the prevailing light or weather were at least as important to him as the specific subject he was depicting. Two of the works shown in 1890 featured a pond - the first in freezing conditions, and the second in the midday sun. The limited extent of the shadows in the present work suggests that it may well be identical with La mare, effet de soleil, midi ('The Pond, Sunny Conditions, Midday'). The main body of water seen in the picture could of course be a river rather than a pond, but this seems unlikely given that the artist's viewpoint looks directly out across the water, which would only be feasible in the case of a river if he were standing on a bridge or jetty.
Autumn Landscape was painted in the vicinity of Grez-sur-Loing, on the edge of the Fontainbleau Forest, where O'Conor is known to have worked for at least two years from 1889-90. Here he was part of an international colony of artists, most of whom were studying at one of the Parisian ateliers and came to Grez only for the summer, in order to produce plein air studies of the river, the boats, the famous bridge and the buildings backing onto the Loing. Guthrie and Lavery were two of the English-speaking artists with whom O'Conor associated.
The prevailing pictorial style at Grez was one of Bastien-Lepage influenced naturalism, emphasising accurately observed tones applied using a 'square brush' technique. O'Conor broke the mould by his receptiveness to the very latest modernist style: Impressionism, which stunned him when he first came across it in Paris, probably at the 8th and last Impressionist exhibition of 1886. More specifically, he may also have made enquiries about the activities of Sisley, who was living in the village of Les Sablons and painting on a stretch of the River Loing just 7 1/2 miles from Grez at this time. One possible link was via the Australian artist John Peter Russell, an acquaintance of the Irishman who painted a picture of Madame Sisley on the banks of the Loing in 1887. There are clear echoes of Sisley's St Mammès pictures of the 1880s in O'Conor's determined preference for unostentatious subjects and his deployment of scratchy, thickly impasted brushstrokes to represent reeds and thickets.
So radically different, in fact, were O'Conor's methods from those of his associates at Grez that he was generally considered 'the one genius of the crowd', and the artist responsible for introducing Impressionism to the colony. Where he led, others would eventually follow, notable among them being the American Impressionists Robert Vonnoh and Edward Potthast.
J.B.
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