Roderic O'Conor
TREES AT MONTIGNY, 1902
Lot 24
Result:
Not Sold
Estimate:
€100,000 - €150,000
Roderic O'Conor, 1860-1940
TREES AT MONTIGNY, 1902
Oil on board, 14 1/4" x 17 1/2" 36.3 x 44.4cm). Atelier stamp verso.
Provenance:Studio of the artist, sold Htel Drouot, Paris, 7 February 1956;Roland, Browse & Delbanco, London;Private C...
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Lot 24
Roderic O'Conor
TREES AT MONTIGNY, 1902

Estimate:
€100,000 - €150,000
Roderic O'Conor, 1860-1940
TREES AT MONTIGNY, 1902
Oil on board, 14 1/4" x 17 1/2" 36.3 x 44.4cm). Atelier stamp verso.
Provenance:Studio of the artist, sold Htel Drouot, Paris, 7 February 1956;Roland, Browse & Delbanco, London;Private Collection, Glastonbury, on loan to the Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry for 10 years.
Exhibited: Roland, Browse & Delbanco, Roderic OConor 1860-1940, London, July 1961, no. 8.
The present work re-emerged from a private English collection only in the last decade. An exciting addition to Roderic OConors oeuvre, it dates from his most progressive decade and was last on the market in 1961. Today the freshness and vigour of the paint handling in this picture seems in denial of its gestation 122 years ago proof, if needed, of how far ahead of his time the artist was.
Montigny-sur-Loing is a village on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, 75 kilometres south-east of Paris. From the second half of the nineteenth century, it could easily be reached by train from the capital and became the point of disembarkation for scores of artists, drawn as they were by the attractions of woodland, river, sunshine and youthful camaraderie. Daubigny and Czanne both painted the local church, in 1857 and 1898 respectively, as would OConor a few years later. He first discovered the locale in the late 1880s, while still a student in the atelier of Charles Carolus-Duran in Paris. Joining the artists colony at Grez-sur-Loing, just five kilometres downstream, he followed in the wake of fellow Irishmen John Lavery and Frank OMeara. Despite meeting Lavery, OConor took no interest in the Bastien-Lepage-inspired naturalism favoured by his compatriots, opting instead for the more progressive broken brushwork and unmixed colours of Impressionism. His radicalism earned him the admiration of the American painters, Robert Vonnoh and Edward Potthast.
OConors fondness for this, his first stamping ground as a committed modernist, was such that he returned to the area several times in the mid-1890s, generally staying with his friends, the American painter Francis Brooks Chadwick and his Swedish wife Emma (ne Lwstdt). He did some etching, but otherwise he was content to relax in familiar surroundings. In August-September of 1902 he returned again, this time it seems as a guest of fellow Irish artist Katherine MacCausland and her partner, the American Guy Ferris Maynard, who lived at nearby Marlotte.[1] His motivation for this trip went beyond the renewal of old acquaintances, since he had had his painting equipment sent ahead, doubtless welcoming the change in terrain from his usual base in Brittany. Brief though it was, the visit triggered a renewal of his interest in painting outdoor subjects, such that by the time of his return to Pont-Aven in early October, he had completed a series of at least a dozen views of the River Loing bordered by lines of poplar trees, generally viewed against the light as blue silhouettes and just starting to show their autumn colours. Over the next six years, OConors confidence in this new body of work led him to exhibit eleven paintings with Montigny titles at the Salon dAutomne and Salon des Indpendants in Paris.
Inspiration for the Montigny pictures doubtless came from Claude Monets famous series featuring poplars on the Epte, executed in 1891 and exhibited at the Durand-Ruel gallery ion Paris, February-March 1892. However, at Montigny OConor placed less emphasis on the trees tall, slim proportions, whilst he often preferred a landscape format to the upright compositions that gave Monets evenly spaced trunks such a sense of elevation, with their more remote neighbours snaking away into the distance through the gaps. OConors series, on the other hand, of which the present piece is a fully resolved example, were more concerned with the mystery of indistinct forms viewed under twilit conditions. His paintings also evinced a breadth of handling, boldness of colour and almost Cloisonnist flattening of three-dimensional forms that demonstrated the artists proto-Fauve credentials, three years before the Fauves made their sensational debut at the Salon dAutomne.[2] Rather than aping Monets seasonal variants, the Montigny pictures were created in one intense spell of work and depicted shorter, stubbier trees with broader foliage. Water is nearly always present, sometimes with a weir included to emphasise movement, such that, as a distinct body of work, one is obliged to seek a precedent within OConors own oeuvre. Surely these paintings are the freshwater partners to his series of Breton seascapes executed four years earlier, with their red, orange and pink rocks set against blue and green waves.
On the banks of the Loing, OConor may have felt far removed from the rugged terrain he knew so well, yet he did not broker any relaxation of his modernist agenda. This is especially apparent in the thick and gestural brushstrokes used to paint the foliage, sky and riverbank in Trees at Montigny, conveying the effect of a breeze stirring the leaves and rippling the surface of the water. The group of trees in this painting is identical with that featured in another work from the series, Le Loing at Sundown (sold Chorleys, Prinknash, 5 December 2022, lot 2), although the present work adopts a more close-up view such that strips of the sky and river are cropped, likewise a smaller tree at the far right of the group. The net effect of these changes is to render the present work more abstract, more mysterious, with the forms presented mostly on a single parallel plane, virtually omitting foreground and background.
To render the evening light in Trees at Montigny the artist deployed a palette of vivid hues including turquoise, ultramarine, dark blue and two shades of yellow, exaggerating the local colours of the scene. The derivation of this technique, still highly radical in 1902, harked back to OConors precocious commitment to innovation, inspired directly by the canvases of Paul Gauguin (the heightened, flattened colours) and Vincent van Gogh (the expressionist gestures) that he discovered ten years earlier. The swaying leaves and boughs in Trees at Montigny recall, for example, the movement captured by the Dutchman in his olive grove and Hospital of Saint-Rmy paintings executed in 1889. The extent to which OConor was in advance of his English-speaking contemporaries should not be under-estimated, given that he had been applying Post-Impressionist methods since 1892 and was continuing to push the boundaries ten years later. Small wonder Hugh Lane sought him out for his seminal Exhibition of Works by Irish Painters at Londons Guildhall in 1904.[3]
Jonathan Benington, 24 June 2024
[1] Une Vie de Bohme, Lettres du peintre Armand Seguin Roderic OConor 1895-1903, Muse de Pont-Aven, 1989, letter 87, 10 August 1902, p. 180. McCausland mentioned her friendship with OConor in a letter sent from Le Pouldu to Alice Stopford Green, 19 February [1899] (National Library of Ireland, Dublin, MS 15,088/8).
[2] The frieze-like treatment of the poplars viewed contrejour in Trees at Montigny prefigures, for example, Andr Derains Arbre, paysage au bord dune rivire, painted in 1905 (Collection Fondation Merzbacher).
[3] National Library of Ireland, Dublin, MS 13/072/1/60/2.
TREES AT MONTIGNY, 1902
Oil on board, 14 1/4" x 17 1/2" 36.3 x 44.4cm). Atelier stamp verso.
Provenance:Studio of the artist, sold Htel Drouot, Paris, 7 February 1956;Roland, Browse & Delbanco, London;Private Collection, Glastonbury, on loan to the Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry for 10 years.
Exhibited: Roland, Browse & Delbanco, Roderic OConor 1860-1940, London, July 1961, no. 8.
The present work re-emerged from a private English collection only in the last decade. An exciting addition to Roderic OConors oeuvre, it dates from his most progressive decade and was last on the market in 1961. Today the freshness and vigour of the paint handling in this picture seems in denial of its gestation 122 years ago proof, if needed, of how far ahead of his time the artist was.
Montigny-sur-Loing is a village on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, 75 kilometres south-east of Paris. From the second half of the nineteenth century, it could easily be reached by train from the capital and became the point of disembarkation for scores of artists, drawn as they were by the attractions of woodland, river, sunshine and youthful camaraderie. Daubigny and Czanne both painted the local church, in 1857 and 1898 respectively, as would OConor a few years later. He first discovered the locale in the late 1880s, while still a student in the atelier of Charles Carolus-Duran in Paris. Joining the artists colony at Grez-sur-Loing, just five kilometres downstream, he followed in the wake of fellow Irishmen John Lavery and Frank OMeara. Despite meeting Lavery, OConor took no interest in the Bastien-Lepage-inspired naturalism favoured by his compatriots, opting instead for the more progressive broken brushwork and unmixed colours of Impressionism. His radicalism earned him the admiration of the American painters, Robert Vonnoh and Edward Potthast.
OConors fondness for this, his first stamping ground as a committed modernist, was such that he returned to the area several times in the mid-1890s, generally staying with his friends, the American painter Francis Brooks Chadwick and his Swedish wife Emma (ne Lwstdt). He did some etching, but otherwise he was content to relax in familiar surroundings. In August-September of 1902 he returned again, this time it seems as a guest of fellow Irish artist Katherine MacCausland and her partner, the American Guy Ferris Maynard, who lived at nearby Marlotte.[1] His motivation for this trip went beyond the renewal of old acquaintances, since he had had his painting equipment sent ahead, doubtless welcoming the change in terrain from his usual base in Brittany. Brief though it was, the visit triggered a renewal of his interest in painting outdoor subjects, such that by the time of his return to Pont-Aven in early October, he had completed a series of at least a dozen views of the River Loing bordered by lines of poplar trees, generally viewed against the light as blue silhouettes and just starting to show their autumn colours. Over the next six years, OConors confidence in this new body of work led him to exhibit eleven paintings with Montigny titles at the Salon dAutomne and Salon des Indpendants in Paris.
Inspiration for the Montigny pictures doubtless came from Claude Monets famous series featuring poplars on the Epte, executed in 1891 and exhibited at the Durand-Ruel gallery ion Paris, February-March 1892. However, at Montigny OConor placed less emphasis on the trees tall, slim proportions, whilst he often preferred a landscape format to the upright compositions that gave Monets evenly spaced trunks such a sense of elevation, with their more remote neighbours snaking away into the distance through the gaps. OConors series, on the other hand, of which the present piece is a fully resolved example, were more concerned with the mystery of indistinct forms viewed under twilit conditions. His paintings also evinced a breadth of handling, boldness of colour and almost Cloisonnist flattening of three-dimensional forms that demonstrated the artists proto-Fauve credentials, three years before the Fauves made their sensational debut at the Salon dAutomne.[2] Rather than aping Monets seasonal variants, the Montigny pictures were created in one intense spell of work and depicted shorter, stubbier trees with broader foliage. Water is nearly always present, sometimes with a weir included to emphasise movement, such that, as a distinct body of work, one is obliged to seek a precedent within OConors own oeuvre. Surely these paintings are the freshwater partners to his series of Breton seascapes executed four years earlier, with their red, orange and pink rocks set against blue and green waves.
On the banks of the Loing, OConor may have felt far removed from the rugged terrain he knew so well, yet he did not broker any relaxation of his modernist agenda. This is especially apparent in the thick and gestural brushstrokes used to paint the foliage, sky and riverbank in Trees at Montigny, conveying the effect of a breeze stirring the leaves and rippling the surface of the water. The group of trees in this painting is identical with that featured in another work from the series, Le Loing at Sundown (sold Chorleys, Prinknash, 5 December 2022, lot 2), although the present work adopts a more close-up view such that strips of the sky and river are cropped, likewise a smaller tree at the far right of the group. The net effect of these changes is to render the present work more abstract, more mysterious, with the forms presented mostly on a single parallel plane, virtually omitting foreground and background.
To render the evening light in Trees at Montigny the artist deployed a palette of vivid hues including turquoise, ultramarine, dark blue and two shades of yellow, exaggerating the local colours of the scene. The derivation of this technique, still highly radical in 1902, harked back to OConors precocious commitment to innovation, inspired directly by the canvases of Paul Gauguin (the heightened, flattened colours) and Vincent van Gogh (the expressionist gestures) that he discovered ten years earlier. The swaying leaves and boughs in Trees at Montigny recall, for example, the movement captured by the Dutchman in his olive grove and Hospital of Saint-Rmy paintings executed in 1889. The extent to which OConor was in advance of his English-speaking contemporaries should not be under-estimated, given that he had been applying Post-Impressionist methods since 1892 and was continuing to push the boundaries ten years later. Small wonder Hugh Lane sought him out for his seminal Exhibition of Works by Irish Painters at Londons Guildhall in 1904.[3]
Jonathan Benington, 24 June 2024
[1] Une Vie de Bohme, Lettres du peintre Armand Seguin Roderic OConor 1895-1903, Muse de Pont-Aven, 1989, letter 87, 10 August 1902, p. 180. McCausland mentioned her friendship with OConor in a letter sent from Le Pouldu to Alice Stopford Green, 19 February [1899] (National Library of Ireland, Dublin, MS 15,088/8).
[2] The frieze-like treatment of the poplars viewed contrejour in Trees at Montigny prefigures, for example, Andr Derains Arbre, paysage au bord dune rivire, painted in 1905 (Collection Fondation Merzbacher).
[3] National Library of Ireland, Dublin, MS 13/072/1/60/2.
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