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16 RODERIC O’CONOR (1860 - 1940) Girl with Red Waistcoat (1927)Oil on canvas, 63 X 52 cm (24.75 X 20.5”)
Signed ‘O’Conor’ (not by the artist)
Atelier stamp verso
Provenance: “Vente O’Conor”, Hotel Drouot, 7th February 1956; Crane Kalman Gallery, London from whom it was
acquired by Allied Irish Banks 1981 and sold by them in DeVere’s sale, June 1996, Catalogue No.32,
where purchased by current owners.
Exhibited:
AIB Collection Travelling Exhibition,
Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; Crawford Gallery Cork; and The Ulster
Museum Gallery, Belfast 1986.
Literature:
AIB Collection: Twentieth Century Irish Art
1986, illustrated p.20;
Roderic O’Conor
by Jonathan Benington, 1992, Catalogue No.276, p.223.
This studio painting of O’Conor’s was formerly in the collection of the Allied Irish Bank, as ‘
Girl with Red Waistcoat’
. It
was included in the travelling exhibition The Allied Irish Banks Collection. Twentieth Century Irish Art, 1986, shown
in Dublin at the Douglas Hyde Gallery; Cork, Crawford Art Gallery; and Belfast at the Ulster Museum. In the 1986
catalogue, Dr.Frances Ruane wrote of this painting;
‘Girl with a Red Waistcoat’
is a late work but it demonstrates the
electric intensity of colour and the vigour of execution that we have come to identify with O’Conor.’
The painting is one of several which Roderic O’Conor made in the summer of 1927, working with this particular
model in his Montparnasse studio. In that year O’Conor wrote affectionately to his mistress, René Honta, who was
taking a break from Paris city life on a visit to Cellettes in the Loire valley, informing her that he was about to start
working with a new model who had been recommended to him by his friend the English painter John Milner-Kite.
‘Big news’ he wrote to René...’I have started to work…oh so little but it is still a start, on a painting of a new model.
She is not very pretty but she is a strange type a little like Gauguin’s women but with a skin more clear and matt. I
intend to do it with a kind of vermillion over-blouse which she has…we shall see.’
(Letter formerly in the collection of the late Dr.Robelet, O’Conor’s physician in Nueil-sur-Layon in the west of France,
where O’Conor died in 1940.)
O’Conor seated his dark eyed model on a green upholstered stool and cleverly placed an ornate picture frame
behind her to visually ‘contain’ the figure within his composition, introducing a strong horizontal contrast to the
otherwise three vertical divisions in the background which included the folds of a dark red velvet curtain. Behind
this curtain was a storage area for O’Conor’s finished works.
Several paintings have been traced which resulted from this new initiative, including the painting selected for exhi-
bition at the Salon des Tuileries in Paris in 1928, which was catalogued as No. 2149
‘Fille au Gilet Rouge’
. ‘
Girl with
Red Waistcoat’
is not the painting which represented O’Conor that year, but it is part of the series which preceded
it.
Roy Johnston, May 2017
€ 15,000 - 25,000