IRISH ART AUCTION - 22nd May 2012
Lot 22
Roderic O'Conor (1860-1940)
FLEURS DANS UN VASE
Oil on card laid down on board, 16” x 13” (40.5 x 33cm), signed.
Provenance: Loudmer Poulain SCP, Palais d’Orsay, Paris, 29 December 1977, lot 122 (according to a label on the reverse)
Private Collection, Virginia, USA
The high keyed colouring of Fleurs dans un Vase ‘demonstrates O’Conor’s preference for colours used at full strength. The choice of colour range is typical of his palette with the dark shaped narrow necked vase set on a red draped surface and the yellow and red blooms of the flowers and the green leaves set against the blue grey background’. (Dr. Roy Johnston, private correspondence, 2011) .
The application of paint, particularly in the rendering of the chrysanthemums, poppies and marigold amply illustrate ‘how he handled his materials with an anarchic disregard for the niceties of finish and clearly derived a sensuous pleasure from their manipulation. To him, oil paint was a very plastic medium capable of making an aesthetic impact that was independent of its representational function’. Jonathan Benington, Roderic O’Conor, Irish Academic Press, Dublin, 1992, p.15.
While painted after his return to Paris in 1904, the inclusion of a ceramic Japanese figurine nestled immediately behind the vase harks back to the artist’s earlier Pont Aven period when Japonisme was a defining characteristic of Gauguin and his ‘talisman’ followers as it would go on to be for the Nabis, both movements with which O’Conor associated himself without ever compromising the independence that he so fiercely protected throughout his artistic
career.
Estimate: €30,000 - €50,000
AUCTION DETAILS:
IRISH ART AUCTION
Tuesday 22nd May 2012
The Berkeley Court Hotel, Lansdowne Road, Dublin 4