The Irishman Roderick O'Connor was born 17 October 1860 in Milltown, Co. Roscommon. An heir to a large family estate, he was initially educated at home and later at Ampleforth College near York in England, a Catholic boarding school for boys, where he won many prizes for academic achievement.

At 18 he enrolled at Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin and later also studied at the Royal Hibernian Academy. Among those Irish artists who could afford to, it was not unusual at the time to continue their artistic education on the continent. Their destination was Academe Royale des Beaux-Arts at Antwerp from where they beat their path to Paris and further afield. The year that Roderick O'Connor himself spent in Antwerp seems decisive for his future life. After returning to Ireland he left again within 2 years, now at 26, for Paris. His father continued his allowance which meant that young Roderick did not have to live from his art.

photo: Roderick O'Connor at Grez-sur-Loing in1890.

As his life on the continent took root, first in Paris, then at Grez (an artists' colony near Fontenblou) and at Pont Aven on the Brittany coast, his visits back home became less frequent. He was establishing a place for himself among the artistic community there and besides his family affairs there was little else to call him back home. He came back briefly in 1893 after his father's death as main beneficiary and co-executor of his father's will. Eventually he sold off most of his estates (by his own admission he did well by the Land Purchase Act) and with the proceeds bought shares in a number of American corporations.

I draw attention to these prosaic events in O'Connor's life, for it seems to me a little curious, considering the social and political upheavals of the time, that the painter and admirer of Breton rural life should have shown such little interest in the peasant back home (I don't know of any works which feature the Irish peasant), and that he be content with the easy livelihood he received from that very peasant's toil. Looking also at the companies he graced with his investments after the sale of his estates in Ireland; US Steel Corporation, Southern Railway Company, General Electric, American Telephone & Telegraph, and Pullman, one might wonder about the authenticity of his avowed relationship to nature, the land and the simple life.

It was during his second visit to Pont Aven, after the death of his father, that O'Connor met up with Paul Gaugin in the summer of 1894. He was 34, Gaugin was 46. It was at this time that Paul Gaugin lodged for a time with Slewinski at Le Pouldu after his return from Tahiti with Anna, his teenage Javanese lover, and her pet monkey. It was indeed on account of Anna, who was pelted with stones by some children, that Gaugin suffered a broken leg in a brawl with local fishermen.

Those 6 months ware also the longest period all three men spent together close to Gaugin as a mentor who had just returned from Tahiti. We can imagine how impressive he must have appeared with his wealth of experience and a rather unconventional lifestyle.

Paul Gaugin "Anna The Javanese”, 1893.

A shared symbolic order is a phrase of Peter Fuller's, the art critic, who used it to describe the mediaeval cast of mind where each aspect of the world had a clearly defined and a necessary relationship to the whole. It is perhaps that which the artists sought to re-establish in congregating together. Having opposed Establishment Art, they have become outsiders in the scheme of things; they have lost their natural nourishing ground of a profession and equally have taken on a revolutionary role which many could not master. On the political front, the rise of democracy and communism and also of nationalism can be viewed similarly as a transfer of value to the authentic salt of the earth.

By 1895 however, Pont Aven was finished. Its founders Gaugin and Bernard having left, the little town in the middle of a tourist boom perhaps not unlike our own cultural quarter not far from here, was "crowded with tarts, equivocal males, doubtful barons and pseudo artists". By early summer O'Connor moves inland to a small place Rochefort-en-Terre where during the next couple of years he became somewhat of a recluse. He was depressed and suffered from some undefined illness.

At the beginning of 1899 he yet returns to the "finished" Pont Aven and will stay for the next five years. It is around this time, toward the end of the Rochefort-en-Terre exile and the move back to Pont Aven, that he paints, for me, his most extraordinary seascapes ever, and a number of imaginative works which are still somewhat of a mystery.

He moves to Paris at the beginning of 1904, where, although described as both a cynic and a loner, he sets up a live-in studio in Montparnasse and mixes liberally in Anglo-American circles. These were fun yet artistically conservative. The studio provides him with an intimate stage set for most of his work of the period which in one way could be seen as a settling time in his life. The numerous nudes & still lives seem rather like a gentlemen's repast, a mixture of the romantic and the domestic.

1909
Roderick O'Connor ”Nude before mirror”

The final settlement in the sale of his Irish estates in 1910 allows a certain change in his lifestyle. He travels to Spain and Italy for Art and goes painting in Cassis in the south of France until the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. He was then 54.

I see a definite change in O'Connor life around 1912. It is most visible in painting in his treatment of flesh. His travels to the continent seem to have confirmed a return to more classical values but this new found solidity of form is by no means confined to his artistic endeavour. He invests his money in America, sits out the war in Paris and around 1916 begins a relationship with Renée Honta, 34 years his junior, whom he will marry years later in 1933. That year he will eventually leave Paris to settle in Nueil-sur-Layon, in the Loire, where will buy a large house in Renée's name and provide for her handsomely in his will.

1912
Roderick O'Connor "Woman”.

When O'Connor met Renée he was 56, and perhaps this young woman became for him a daughter, a muze, a lover and disciple in one; someone who was not a challenge and before whom he felt no need of a front. His tender letters to her betray a gentler, caring side to his character, in stark contrast to the public persona which was distant, wilful and somewhat cynical.

1917-19
Roderick O'Connor "Young Girl”.

Disinterested in his Irish background and apparently untouched by the horrors of Great War, at least to judge by his paintings, he continued living in Montparnasse which by the 1920-ies became a lively, literary quarter, popular with writers like our own James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Hemingway. Growing reclusive and indifferent, and even openly critical of the modern, of painters like Matisse and Picasso, to the world at large O'Connor remained rather unknown. He continues to paint but exhibits or sells hardly at all. Outwardly he may have lived up to Somerset Maugham's description of the painter Clutton in Of Human Bondage, one "bitter, savage and unknown; still in Paris for the life there has got into his bones, ruling a small cénacle with a savage tongue, at war with himself and the world, producing little in his increasing passion for perfection he could not reach", yet what we know of his relationship with Renée reveals a contrasting opposite to the above.

1923-26
Roderick O'Connor "Rest”.

1932
Roderick O'Connor Chailly-en-bierre.

1932
Roderick O'Connor Chailly-en-bierre.

1934-5
Roderick O'Connor Spain.

Apart from an ill timed trip to Spain in the winter of 1934 from which only a few paintings survive, he seems to have stopped painting during the last years of his life. He died 6 months into World War II, in March 1940.

1935
Roderick O'Connor Torremolinos.