Lot 23 Roderic O'Conor BRETON FARMSTEAD WITH HAYSTACK (c.1892)

Roderic O'Conor, 1860-1940
BRETON FARMSTEAD WITH HAYSTACK (c.1892)
Oil on canvas, 20" x 24" (51 x 61cm), with monogram bottom left.

Provenance: Ader, Paris 22/11/22 (lot 12): Private Collection, Dublin

The lack of any windows, doors or chimneys in the large, elongated structure at the centre of this painting suggests that it is a haystack rather than a building. Haystacks on this sort of scale can be seen in the backgrounds of Breton landscapes by Paul Gauguin, Henry Moret and Paul Srusier, all of whom relished the additional sculptural dimension they brought to the local farmland (see especially Gauguins Haystacks in Brittany, 1890, National Gallery of Art, Washington). At hay harvest time, late May to early June, haystacks were built by local men and women using tall ladders, such that once finished they became prominent features of the Finistre landscape. Small wonder that they inspired artists of the Pont-Aven School, both in terms of their manner of construction and of their geometric shapes once built. That they were often erected adjacent to farm buildings is clear from the testimony of Dorothy Menpes:

Now and then, by way of incident, we passed a group of white houses, surrounded by sad-coloured haystacks, and a few darkly-clad figures hurrying over the fields [1]

OConor would have encountered the subject of the present painting in the neighbourhood of Pont-Aven, most probably on the higher, level ground of Lezaven or just above the Bois dAmour the kind of outlying, quieter locations that he favoured in the art colonies he frequented during the 1880s and 1890s.

Breton Farmstead with Haystack shows traces of the Irish artists famous striping technique, for example in the trees at the far left of the canvas. OConor most probably embarked on the painting as a plein air landscape, finding a shady spot in which to work away from the glare of the hot midday sun. After laying down the main elements of the composition fairly quickly and allowing them to dry, he would then have built the paint surface up in the studio to add texture and greater colour variation. At the same time he reinforced the spatial recession of his subject by dividing it into a series of parallel bands foreground grass, middle ground haystacks and buildings, and finally trees and sky. This simple but effective arrangement leads the viewers gaze into and through the tranquil scene, from which the artist has typically excluded any figures.

The paintings that survive from OConors first full year in Pont-Aven, 1892, were executed in a range of different techniques as he gradually found his feet in the new art colony. Gauguin was in the South Seas, whilst Emile Bernard did not show up until mid-summer, leaving the Swiss artist Cuno Amiet, the French printmaker Armand Seguin and the Scottish painter Eric Forbes-Robertson as his new comrades. The absence of a seasoned Pont-Aven School artist in the first half of the year meant that the Irishman was free to innovate as he felt appropriate. His boldest striped landscapes two views of a wheatfield and one wooded interior were not undertaken until the summer months of 1892. The present work is one of a group of medium-scale landscapes that he completed around the same time, if not slightly earlier. They are noted for deploying a system of smaller, multi-directional brushstrokes that yield a tightly-knit web of bright colours (see also Red Roofs in Tate Britain and Paysage aux Arbres, sold de Veres, 14 June 2022, lot 14). In other words, as a recent but very much inspired member of the colony, OConor chose to vary his pictorial mark-making depending on his subject, just as Van Gogh had done in paintings executed only a few days apart.

Jonathan Benington, October 2024

[1] Dorothy Menpes, Brittany, illustrated by Mortimer Menpes (London 1905), p. 187.