James Arthur O'Connor (1792-1841)
View in Castle Coote Demesne
Oil on canvas, 63.4 x 76cm (25 x 29¾'')
Signed and dated 1840

Exhibited: Dublin 1872, Exhibition of Arts, Industries and...

James Arthur O'Connor (1792-1841)
View in Castle Coote Demesne
Oil on canvas, 63.4 x 76cm (25 x 29¾'')
Signed and dated 1840

Exhibited: Dublin 1872, Exhibition of Arts, Industries and Manufacturies, No.1678; Dublin 1941, James Arthur O'Connor Centenary Exhibition; Dublin 1985, National Gallery of Ireland, James Arthur O'Connor, Catalogue No.87.

Literature: John Hutchinson, James Arthur O'Connor, NGI 1985, p.190, b&w illustration.

 

James Arthur OConnor was born in Dublin, the son of an engraver and printer, William OConnor. Although given a few lessons by Dublin artist William Sadler, he was largely self-taught. A lifelong friend of George Petrie and Francis Danby, he went to London with them in 1813, only to return a short time later to look after his orphaned sisters. His reputation as an artist quickly developed while back in Ireland, painting a series of landscapes for the Marquis of Sligo and Lord Clanricarde. In 1821 OConnor and his wife, Anastatia, emigrated to London and the following year he exhibited at the Royal Academy. Over the course of the next decade he travelled a great deal in Europe, visiting France, Belgium, Holland and Germany, spending several months in the Rhine Valley. With his eyesight and his general health failing in 1839, his output diminished dramatically and he eventually died, virtually penniless, in London in 1841.

 

John Hutchinson noted, in the catalogue for a retrospective exhibition in the National Gallery of Ireland in 1985, that O'Connor's work may be divided into three distinctive phases - early topographical paintings, mid-period picturesque and late romantic.

 

In his late period, the principal source of inspiration was the Italian painter Salvator Rosa, and from around 1830 until the end of his career, O'Connor tended to paint landscapes of dramatic intensity in which rock outcrops, darkly brooding skies and windblown trees are the main features. The present work, A View in Castlecoote Demesne which fits perfectly to this description and is, according to Thomas Bodkin in his 1920 Four Irish Landscape Painters, perhaps the artists final painting. He describes the painting: The tone of the picture is golden brown: there is a faint touch of blue in the sky. It is painted in a vigorous, easy style, with good impasto. He further says that, in all probability, the picture was done for Captain (later Colonel) Chidley Coote, of Huntington, Queens County, his most consistent and generous patron.

 

In summing up OConnors contribution to late 18th and 19th century Irish landscape painting, John Hutchinson states because OConnors romantic paintings depend for their effect on the observers acceptance of them as naturalistic which, by and large, they are it is more difficult to distance oneself from them, or to treat them, like Danbys later work, as fantasy or escapism. In their own way, OConnors romantic images can speak to us as vitally now as they did to his contemporaries. Therein, I think, lies their significance. Moreover, they justify John Bergers assertion that the history of landscape painting is a movement from direct description to self-expression, from either topography or emblematisation to landscapes of the mind. In OConnors work can be seen the progression of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century; his portraits of houses are thoroughly conditioned by his patrons expectations, his picturesque views are idealized, but the romantic paintings provide us with surprisingly direct access both to the artists times and to a genuinely personal perception of life.

 

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