Beschreibung:

A TREE IN A FIELD Roderic O'Conor (1860-1940)
Signature: signed lower left; stamped "atelier O'CONOR" on reverse; also several exhibition labels on reverse Medium: oil on canvas Dimensions: 54 by 65cm., 21.2 by 25.5in. Provenance: Sale, Hôtel Drouot, Vente O'Conor, 7 February 1956; Roland Browse & Delbanco, London; Whence purchased by H. E. Bates Esq, Ashford, circa 1961; Thence by descent Exhibited: 'Roderic O'Conor 1960-1940', Roland Browse & Delbanco, London, July 1961, catalogue no. 16 (illustrated in catalogue); 'Gauguin and the Pont-Aven Group', Arts Council exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London, 1966, catalogue no. 301, lent by H.E. Bates Esq Literature: Jonathan Benington, Roderic O'Conor A Biography, with a Catalogue of his Work, Irish Academic Press, Dublin, 1992, catalogue no. 42, listed page 194 By 1894, O’Conor had been based in the Breton town of Pont-Aven for three years. For most of that time he had been painting in a style that owed little to the flattened forms favoured by Gauguin and ... the Pont-Aven School, choosing instead to adopt the alternating ‘stripes’ of brilliantly coloured pigment seen in the late work of Van Gogh. Thus from 1892 to 1894 O’Conor was the odd man out in Pont-Aven, ploughing his own artistic furrow whilst Gauguin was absent on his first visit to Tahiti. The year 1894, however, would see a seismic shift in the Irishman’s personal life and artistic career, thanks to Gauguin’s long-awaited return to Brittany. The visit ushered in a burgeoning friendship and artistic exchange between the two men, with O’Conor lending Gauguin his studio, defending the older man in a fist fight with local sailors, supporting him with the purchase of several Tahitian canvases, and finally being invited to return with him to the South Seas. The Tree in the Field is a transitional work that still has one foot planted in the Van Gogh-inspired methodology of 1892-3, whilst the other foot is moving in a direction that points to a new sympathy for the recent work of Gauguin. It is to O’Conor’s credit that he manages to reconcile two diametrically opposed painting styles in this radiant landscape. In doing so he nails his colours boldly to the mast of the European avant garde, a whole decade before any other Irish or British painters would catch up with him. The subject of the present work possesses the reassuring everyday-ness that we associate with Van Gogh: a solitary fruit tree, standing in a field with hedges and hills rising in the background, and silhouetted against a turbulent blue sky. One is reminded immediately of the flowering peach tree Van Gogh painted shortly after his arrival in Arles in 1888. Closer scrutiny of O’Conor’s painting reveals vestiges of his trademark parallel ‘stripe’, for example in the bole of the tree and, more consistently, in the pinkish-mauve band of hills punctuated with blue-green diagonal streaks. O’Conor reserved the same treatment (in black-and-white) for the background of a related ink drawing, Trees in a Field (Bristol Art Gallery), although the drawing is much more stylised and two-dimensional than the painting. The predominant colours in The Tree in the Field are orange, purple, light green, dark green and blue. The brushwork in most parts of the picture – especially the field, the sky and the foliage of the tree – is broken and scumbled, allowing areas of unpainted canvas to show through. The combination of a new lightness of touch with a greater use of colours at the warm end of the spectrum can be directly attributed to contact with Gauguin. Some of the latter’s Tahitian landscapes exhibit a similar tendency to organise the painting in terms of richly varied zones of colour, with each zone defined by directional variations in the brushstrokes rather than by the use of outlines. Having used this method experimentally in The Tree in the Field, O’Conor developed it further in another landscape of 1894, La ferme de Lezaven, Pont-Aven (National Gallery of Ireland). Much of the latter picture must, however, have bee