Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 31 MAY 2023

78 55 RODERIC O’CONOR (1860-1940) Still Life with Red and Yellow Flowers (c.1923-27) Oil on canvas, 32 x 40cm (12½ x 14¾”) Signed Provenance: Collection Monsieur G. Bourget, France; With Crane Kalman Gallery, London, where purchased c.1977 and thence by descent to the present owners; Sale, Sotheby’s London 24 November 1993, lot 114A; Sale, Sotheby’s London, The Irish Sale, 11 May 2006, lot 50; The Estates of Dr. John & Mary Esther O’Driscoll, Kildare Exhibited: Dublin, Godolphin Gallery, 1978, Roderic O’Conor - a selection of his best works in Ireland , catalogue no. 25 € 30,000 - 50,000 Throughout his fifty-year career, O’Conor never tired of the challenge of painting cut flowers. They first ap- pear in his early Breton still lifes of the 1890s, only to reappear in works painted in Cassis in 1913 such as Iris (bought for the Contemporary Art Society by Roger Fry and now in Tate Britain), and in the 1920s in Paris with pieces such as Le Pot Chinois (acquired in 1927 by the French state and now in the Musée d’Orsay). The subject played perfectly to his skills as a master colourist: how to reinterpret his sensuous enjoyment of the flowers’ appearance and perfume in the medi- um of oil paint. The solution for him was to deploy a palette of radiant colours and a full range of gestur- al brushstrokes, scumblings, stains and thick smears with a palette knife. He generally worked directly onto the canvas without any under-drawing, in order to preserve the freshness of his initial response. The majority of O’Conor’s flower paintings executed in the 1920s were vigorously and thickly painted with the aid of the palette knife. However, some excep- tions to this rule may be noted, one of which is Still Life with Red and Yellow Flowers with its densely packed array of late spring blooms, including poppies, dai- sies and tulips. Such works are distinguished by the artist’s highly painterly approach, expressed via a rich and varied display of mark-making, from delicately feathered to creamily scumbled blooms, as well as some that are crisply outlined. In this work O’Conor is also careful to pick out the flowers and leaves in bright tints against a contrasting flatly painted background in a neutral tint. The china vase in Still Life with Red and Yellow Flow- ers has been daringly cropped of all but its upper- most rim and neck, thereby endowing the bouquet of flowers with much greater impact than would have been the case had the entire vase been featured. The flowers have been disposed in a near symmetrical ar- rangement and raised up so as to be level with the artist’s gaze, hence the rim of the vase registers as an extremely shallow ellipse. By acting as stage manag- er of his still life components, O’Conor ensures that the viewer’s experience is rendered highly immediate. A further example of this is the way the flowers have been pushed right to the front of the picture plane, such that one instinctively wishes to touch and smell them, short of relying on visual experience alone. Jonathan Benington, April 2023