Roderic O'Conor

RODERIC O’CONOR Milltown, Co. Roscommon, Ireland 1860 – 1940 Nueil-sur-Layon, Maine-et-Loire, France Roderic O’Conor was the son of the High Sheriff of County Roscommon. He was educated at Ampleforth College, Yorkshire and studied in Dublin at the Metropolitan School of Art and the Royal Hibernian Academy School. He then attended the Antwerp Academy and went to Brittany to paint. O’Conor worked with Carolus Duran in Paris and in 1889 painted at Grez-sur-Loing. In the 1890s O’Conor worked mostly in Brittany, strongly influenced by van Gogh and the Pont Aven group. He became a close friend of Gauguin when he returned from the South Seas in 1894. For the rest of his life O’Conor lived in Paris, making trips into the French countryside to paint landscapes. In the first decade of the twentieth century he made several journeys to Brittany, staying at Pont Aven and Rochefort-en-Terre. He also made sensitive, intimiste interiors which echo the work of Bonnard. O’Conor exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, La Libre Esthetique in Brussels and at the Allied Artists’ Association in London. His visits to the South of France, particularly to Cassis in 1913, encouraged him to experiment with the bold colours and handling of Fauvism. In the 1920s O’Conor acted as host to a number of Bloomsbury Group painters, among them Matthew Smith. In 1933 he married the painter Renée Honta and they moved to Nueil-sur-Layon in the region of Maine-et-Loire. In 1935 and 1936 O’Conor worked in Spain and the following year he staged his only one-man exhibition, at the Galerie Bonaparte, Paris. The work of Roderic O’Conor is represented in the Art Institute of Chicago; the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD; Indianapolis Museum of Art; the Ulster Museum, Belfast; Dublin City Gallery (The Hugh Lane); the Hunt Museum, Limerick and Charleston, East Sussex.