Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 30TH MARCH 2022

56 When O’Connor was forty-three, one of his Irish landscapes was acquired by the Musée des Beaux-Arts Thom- as-Henry, Normandy, on its foundation in 1835, but during the 1830s O’Connor’s eyesight deteriorated and his career went into decline. O’Connor died poor in London aged forty-nine and was buried at St Luke’s Church, Chelsea. Prince Albert and the RA initiated a subscription to assist his widow. His obituary in the Dublin Monthly Magazine spoke of O’Connor as ‘a spirit of exceeding mildness; manly, ardent, unobtrusive and sincere; generous in proclaiming contemporary merit, and unskilled and reluctant to put forth his own’. His skill, imagination and brilliant compositional talents are evident in this exceptional work painted when he was thirty-five years old, Wooded Defile, Figures and Distant Cattle [1827]. Defile, here, means ‘a steep-sided narrow gorge or passage (originally one requiring troops to march in single file)’ and the dramatic, steep, rocky cliff-like landscape to the left and the rising ground to the right create a pathway along which four figures are travelling. These four figures, three men and a woman, carry with them and contain their own stories. In the foreground the two figures, a man and a woman, lit from behind, are given prominence. The tall-hatted man in rust-coloured jacket with walking stick and a dog on a lead, seems to have paused to look back at his companion. The woman in red dress, blue-green shawl and carrying a receptacle - a small cage perhaps? - as if in response to the man before her, stands her ground. Farther along the path, the man with his back to us carrying a basket and stick walks on slowly; the blue cloth in his basket a little bright detail, the side of his face brightly lit. A fourth figure in dark clothes and white shirt walks towards us leading a young cow. Each one prompts in the viewer a narrative of our own making. In this painting from 1827 we are invited to ask, who are they? where are they going? what are they like? And against the distant trees the ‘distant cattle’ of the title – important enough to get a mention. There are beautiful details here: in O’Connor’s handling of trees, rocks, shrubs but the triumph is in his capturing the way light falls through the defile and that beautifully bright golden-blue sky. Light, shade, perspective all make this a radiant and stunning work. Constable who died in 1837, just three years before O’Connor, said that ‘A gentleman’s park is my aversion. It is not beauty because it is not nature.’ Here, O’Connor celebrates the untamed, natural beautiful landscape, a landscape imbued with a Romantic sensibility where rocks and mountains dominate in every sense. Niall MacMonagle, February 2022