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Description: oil on panel

PROVENANCE

Hotel Drouot, Paris, Vente O'Conor, 7 February 1956:
Leicester Galleries, 1961;
Grant Fine Art, Newcastle, 1981;
Acquired by the present owner in 1982

EXHIBITED

London, Leicester Galleries, Exhibition of Works by Artists of Fame and Promise, Part 1, July - August 1961, no.61
CATALOGUE NOTE

Executed circa 1898.
Most of Roderic O'Conor's seascapes were painted between 1898 and 1899 along the stretch of coastline between le Pouldu and Doelan, about 20 kilometres south-east of Pont-Aven. He was nearing the end of a period of retreat in the small town of Rochefort-en-Terre in Morbihan, where he moved from Pont-Aven in 1895. In the summer of that year Gauguin left France for his second voyage to Tahiti and O'Conor's friends among the members of Gauguin's circle in Pont-Aven began to drift apart. O'Conor declined Gauguin's invitation to accompany him to Tahiti and decided to settle in Rochefort-en-Terre. Rochefort is inland and about 120 kilometres east of Pont-Aven, a much quieter location than the one O'Conor left, and probably chosen for that reason. He eventually must have felt a need to return to paint from the greater variety of motifs available to him in the Pont-Aven area. There he could work from the elevated pathways high on the river banks overlooking the town, paint the river in its many moods, and explore the rocky coastline and the cliffs at le Pouldu where he had worked a few years earlier with Armand Seguin on a series of etched prints.

Returning to Pont-Aven in the summer of 1898, he contacted his friend Charles Filiger who had also been a member of Gauguin's circle and was living at Kersulé near le Pouldu. From there he had easy access to the coastline between le Pouldu and Doelan-sur-Mer, where he painted most of his seascapes from vantage points on the cliff top path.

The sea off this part of the Brittany coast is seldom calm or at rest, but is more frequently turbulent and buffeted by Atlantic tides. Waves crash over the rocks, foaming as they swell and surge through the many channels and fissures. This small and lively painting is one of a number in which a high viewing position and a decidedly downward gaze have resulted in the absence of a horizon line. There is no great sense of recession in the painting and the viewer is invited to explore the visual and expressive relationship between rocks and sea. This expression of nature's power is a recurring theme in most of O'Conor's seascapes which he painted using a wet-on-wet technique with a fluid brush and frequent inter mixing on the canvas. The scale of this small work and the energy which O'Conor brought to its painting suggests that he completed it in one session, working directly in front of his subject. This is the same outcrop of rocks that he painted on several occasions and that appear in Remous which he exhibited in the 1903 Salon des Indépendants (no.1882).

Dr. Roy Johnston

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Dimensions: 23 by 35.5cm.; 9 by 14in.