Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 27 MARCH 2024

46 34 JAMES ARTHUR O’CONNOR (1792-1841) Mountain River Landscape with Figures: (‘Near Waterford’) Oil on panel, 23 x 39cm (9 x 15¼”) € 6,000 - 8,000 Painted in 1823, a key year in O’Connor’s artistic develop- ment, this pleasingly composed landscape combines the man-made environment – an ancient stone bridge, humble cabin and church spire – with the natural world, a gloriously complex verdure redolent of high summer, with very effec- tive combination of still and moving water. The rocks and torrent in the foreground are treated with noticeably lively freedom, with an almost pointillist use of rich impasto – all the elements which have made O’Connor such a perennially loved artist are present in abundance. The painting relates to a larger work in which, John Hutchin- son notes in the catalogue for the National Gallery of Ire- land exhibition in 1985, ‘O’Connor had more or less made a complete transition from topography to the picturesque’ (John Hutchinson, James Arthur O’Connor (Dublin, 1985), no. 40 p 131. This version was illustrated on the front cover of Nicola Figgis (ed.), Art and Architecture of Ireland, Volume 2, Painting 1600-1900 ). Our smaller version includes numer- ous changes and, though it is likely to have preceded the more finished work, is in some instances noticeably more successful as a composition. Hutchinson notes the ‘uncom- fortable addition’ of a figure of a young girl in the larger ver- sion which, he suggests, ‘may have been inserted as an af- terthought’. Here in the absence of that figure the flow from fore- to middle-ground coalesces much more successfully. At the same time in our work O’Connor introduces a flick of red on the cloak of an abbreviated female figure walking across the bridge – consisting with masterly economy of just two dots of paint – to catch the eye in what is famously his hallmark motif. As Hutchinson had noted, the early to mid-1820s was a pe- riod of both consolidation and on-going experimentation in O’Connor’s landscape art. He had arrived back in London by early 1822 and soon met with success with his pictures exhibited at the Royal Academy and the British Institution. O’Connor was an artist in constant need of inspiration from the physical world. He expressed this eloquently in relation to the Irish landscape that he loved so well: ‘I am about [to go] to the wild and beautiful scenery of my native country to refresh my memory, and get some studies to help me in fu- ture exertion of my profession – I know I will be benefited by a sight of the grand....scenery that I will meet with in Ireland and hope to show it on canvas’.