James Arthur O'Connor was born in Dublin, the son of an engraver and printer, William O'Connor. 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 1
821 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.
In summing up O’Connor’s contribution to late 18th and 19th century Irish landscape painting, John Hutchinson states “ …because O’Connor’s romantic paintings depend for their effect on the observer’s 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 Danby’s later work, as fantasy or escapism. In their own way, O’Connor’s 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 Berger’s 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 O’Connor’s 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 artist’s times and to a genuinely personal perception of life”.
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