Roderic O'Conor

(Irish, 1860-1940)

A Woman Seated, Holding Two Roses 81.5 x 65.6 cm. (32 x 25 3/4 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
Sale; Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 7 February 1956
Sale; Sotheby's, London, 15 May 1985, lot 63 (as A Woman Seated)
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
Possibly Paris, Grand Palais, Salon d'Automne, 1 October-8 November 1911, cat.no.1159 (as Le Modèle)

Literature
Jonathan Benington, Roderic O'Conor, Irish Academic Press Ltd, Dublin, 1992, p.208, cat.no.149

One year before this painting was executed, O'Conor had experienced a considerable uplift in his fortunes. The sale of his lands in County Roscommon, a protracted process that began following the publication of the Wyndham Land Act in 1903, had only just completed after seven years. The Irishman then promptly took advice from his American friend Alden Brooks and invested the monies in the American stock market. Having lived alone as a bachelor in a one-bedroom studio-apartment in Montparnasse since 1904, he was now able to afford a few luxuries. He immediately set off on a picture-gazing trip to Italy in November 1910, and six months later he purchased two recent oil paintings by Pierre Bonnard for a total of 4,000 francs from the Bernheim Jeune & Cie Gallery at 36 Avenue de l'Opera in Paris. The larger of the two paintings was a standing female nude, the smaller a head-and-shoulders study of a clothed young woman leaning on a sill or the top rail of a chair. The surviving receipt indicates that he settled the dealer's bill in full on 3rd June 1911.

Brooks was visiting his relations in France at this time and dropped in on O'Conor, formerly a very good friend of his father's. The young man noted in his diary on 10th February 1911: 'Up early ... off to Paris. Then ran into O'Conor and talked with him 'til 7:30 ... O'Conor is really a wonderful chap. Admirable life. Lent me a book by one Synge. "greatest playwright since Shakespeare."'

Travel, great literature and beautiful artworks aside, at the age of fifty, O'Conor remained as committed to his own painting and drawing as ever (though he stopped short of spending his money on expensive studio props). The loosely brushed intimiste style he had adopted from about 1909 in his still lifes and interiors with female models, clothed and unclothed, was beginning to tail off. In A Woman Seated, Holding Two Roses he followed a different approach, one that is much more reminiscent of the late works of Pierre-Auguste Renoir than it is of Bonnard. The strict profile view of the model that O'Conor chose for this painting ultimately harks back to Venetian sixteenth-century half-length portraits by artists such as Titian, in which the models pose with one arm resting on a parapet. The Irishman may well have encountered and admired such works on his recent trip to Italy, whilst Renoir, whom he greatly admired, would also certainly have been aware of such antecedents. The profile format, contained within a right-angled triangle and set against a flat pale blue background, lends O'Conor's portrait a classical framework – one that he had previously deployed seven or eight years earlier in some of his studies of Breton women, for example Breton Girl Reading (Private Collection).

O'Conor's correspondence with his good friend Armand Seguin contained many references to Renoir, who undertook several painting excursions to Pont-Aven, not least in 1892 when the Irishman almost certainly met him. Renoir's numerous studies of his favourite model, Gabrielle Renard, such as Gabrielle With a Rose (1911, Musée D'Orsay), would have been very familiar to O'Conor, right down to such details as the cloth rose she liked to put in her hair. In 1905 Renoir was made honorary president of the Salon d'Automne, exhibiting there in 1905, 1906, 1910 and 1912. This Salon was O'Conor's sole Parisian outlet from 1908 up until the outbreak of the Great War, and indeed the fact that the present work is neatly signed and dated at the top left of the canvas suggests that it was intended for exhibition. It may well be the work entitled Le Modèle that he showed there in 1911.

At least one related drawing of the same model depicted in A Woman Seated, Holding Two Roses survives, and although her identity is unknown, the measured approach that the artist took to the development of this composition indicates his determination to produce an arresting image. Using a limited palette of colours – white, pink, red, violet and two shades of blue – and a brush that alternated between rich impasto and loose, wristy gestures, O'Conor has melded the classical with the contemporary, riveting the viewer's gaze on the model's head where all lines converge. Even the walls, windows and doors of the studio have been removed from the background in order to intensify the focus.

We are grateful to Dr Jonathan Bennington for compiling this catalogue entry.