Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 30TH MARCH 2022

54 35 JAMES ARTHUR O’CONNOR (1792-1841) Wooded Defile with Figures and Distant Cattle Oil on canvas, 63 x 75cm (24¾ x 29½’’) Signed and dated 1827 Provenance: Collection of Dr. R.R Woods, Merrion Square, Dublin, label verso. Exhibited: Dublin, Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, O’Connor Centenary Exhibition , 1941, Catalogue No. 35. € 25,000 - 35,000 When, in Pride and Prejudice [1813] Jane Austen has Elizabeth Bennett exclaim ‘What are men to rocks and mountains?’ Austen, though offering us a humorous view of Romanticism, is nonetheless high- lighting the beauty and power of landscape and its effect on us. For T.E. Hulme, the root of all Roman- ticism is when the individual feels within ‘an infinite reservoir of possibility’ and especially when the open, untamed landscape, the great outdoors, works wonders on both mind and imagination. James Arthur O’Connor belongs to the great Romantic movement, a movement that celebrates - in literature, music and especially in painting - creativity and a deep involvement with what Wordsworth calls ‘the goings on of earth and sky’. O’Connor was born, at 9 Exchequer St Dublin, in 1792. Shelley was born that same year. In 1792 Con- stable was sixteen, Turner was seventeen. Wordsworth and Beethoven were both twenty-two, and though not all of them knew each other, being contemporaries, their work reflected and expressed the spirit of the age in which they lived. O’Connor’s father, an engraver and printmaker, died when O’Connor was sixteen, his mother died before O’Connor’s twenty-first birthday. By 1809, O’Connor, then twenty-seven, began to exhibit with success at the Dublin Society. He most likely had been taught by his father but was also self-taught and his early work featured frequently commissioned landscapes of the west of Ireland including View of Lough Derg with Portumna Castle in the Background, The Grounds, Ballinrobe House, View of Westport with Croagh Patrick, Mangerton Killarney. In 1822, O’Connor, experiencing financial difficulties and hoping to improve his lot and help his or- phaned sisters, moved to London with his wife Anastasia. He lived at Upper Marylebone Road, trav- elled widely in Britain and France, exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy, the British Institute and the Royal Society of British Artists. Exiled future French King Louis Philippe bought several of O’Con- nor’s work but O’Connor beset by conmen and dealers, who behaved dishonourably, deprived him of earnings that were rightly his. When he moved to Hampstead he lived close to where John Constable, an important influence, lived. In 1826 O’Connor spent a year in Brussels. In 1832 he lived in Paris for nine months and then spent six months in Southern Germany where the Saar and Moselle valleys inspired some of his best work.