ADAM'S IMPORTANT IRISH ART 24th September 2025

40 19 RODERIC O’CONOR (1860-1940) Breton Girl in a Red Shawl (1896) Oil on canvas 54 x 43.8 cm Signed top left: ‘ROC ‘96’; (stamped “atelier O’CONOR” on reverse of original unlined canvas, now unseen) Provenance: Sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, Vente O’Conor, 7 February 1956; Sale, Sotheby’s, London, 2 July 1969, no. 121; Collection Mervyn and Pat Solomon; Private Collection, Dublin. Exhibited: Paris, Grand Palais, De Pont-Aven aux Nabis , Retrospective 1888-1903 (Société des Artistes Indépendants), April-May 1971, no. 67; Pont Aven, Musée de Pont-Aven, O’Conor (catalogue by Roy Johnston), 30 June – 30 September 1984, no. 17. Literature: Jonathan Benington, Roderic O’Conor, a Biography with a Catalogue of his Work , Dublin 1992, p. 195, no. 46. € 30,000 - 50,000 Further to Gauguin’s final departure from France in June 1895 for Tahiti, the Pont-Aven School of artists entered a period of dispersal and retrenchment. In O’Conor’s case, having turned down Gauguin’s invitation to accompany him, he was keen to demonstrate loyalty to his friend’s championing of the primitive over the civilised. The solu- tion entailed his removal to a more remote location within Brittany. Leaving an increasingly busy Pont-Aven, he chose to settle in Morbihan at the picturesque hilltop village of Rochefort-en-terre, far removed from the amenities of rail travel and well-appointed hotels. Here he completely rethought his pictorial approach, temporarily abandoning landscapes in favour of still lifes and figure subjects that were less obviously reliant on stylistic experimentation. In paintings such as the present work depicting a teen- age Breton girl wearing an artisan’s coiffe or headdress, O’Conor avoided expressive gestures and colours so as to let the subject speak for itself. The only echo of his former ‘striped’ application of glowing colours is in the dress worn by the girl, which has been fabricated from striped materi- al. The face is softly painted, almost impressionistic, while a soft light falls onto the front of the figure so that the cheek, ear and neck are cast in gentle shadows. The strongest note of colour is actually the crimson shawl, harmonising with the flesh tones and providing a strong contrast with the flat, neutral background. The whipped contours of head-dress and shawl have a cloissonist quality and are fit- ted within a pyramidal composition – a feature that chimes with the artist’s earlier paintings of Breton women in which the head was positioned at the apex of a triangle described by the figure’s outlines. O’Conor’s Rochefort sojourn lasted two years, and despite being bothered by ill health, he remained in touch with Charles Filiger and Armand Seguin, the latter keeping him supplied with paint brushes and dispensing advice on print-making, repeatedly asking for money to clear his debts, and using the proceeds from selling his friend’s bike to pay his hotel bill. O’Conor has his books for company, as Seguin writes from Paris: “Oh, how right you were to live isolated amongst the old masters and how happy you must be from your love. Renoir, Cézanne, Redon, they are the only ones …” (Seguin to O’Conor, 23 June 1897).[1] The Irishman’s isolation did, however, yield some creative highs, including the use of a camera to photograph Breton peasants in the main street of Rochefort. But the present work and its much larger corollary, the Breton Woman in Limerick’s Hunt Museum, show that he remained entranced by Brittany’s regional distinctiveness, as manifested in its enduring traditions, many of them unchanged since medie- val times. The depth of O’Conor’s engagement with the Breton ‘other’ may explain why Breton Girl in a Red Shawl was chosen for inclusion in the 1971 Paris exhibition focusing on representation of the Nabi painters at the Salon des Indépendants. This juryless exhibiting body, founded in 1884, received 63 submissions from O’Conor between 1889 and 1908. Whilst he was not one of the Nabi, he exhibited alongside them and shared their commitment to a new way of seeing. Jonathan Benington, August 2025 [1] Une vie de Bohème: Lettres du Peintre Armand Seguin à Roderic O’Conor 1895-1903, Musée de Pont-Aven, 1989, p. 52.