William Conor RHA RUA (1844-1968) The Fiddler Oil on canvas, 44.5 x 34.5cm (17.5 x 13.3'') Signed Provenance: The McClelland Collection and on loan to IMMA from 1999 to 2004. Literature: ''The...

William Conor RHA RUA (1844-1968) The Fiddler Oil on canvas, 44.5 x 34.5cm (17.5 x 13.3'') Signed Provenance: The McClelland Collection and on loan to IMMA from 1999 to 2004. Literature: ''The Hunter Gatherer- The Collection of George and Maura Mc Clelland at the Irish Museum of Modern Art'', Fig 18, full page illustration p. 26 For sheer pictorial skill and design capacity as well as inventiveness with economy of line William Conor has long been an underrated artist. Popular and well known it is more for his apparently easily understood themes and subject matter. Belfast born and trained in the Government School of Design he was also a musician from a very early age. In 1904 he entered the firm of David Allen, the lithographers and Poster Company as an apprentice designer and stayed with them for about five years. It was a most crucial time for the art of poster as all across Europe poster art was the most popular form of public art and spread the ideas of art nouveau through the work of Jules Cher?t and Alphonse Mucha amongst others. Conor was to spend some months on the Blasket Islands shortly thereafter at a very crucial time in the literary history of those Islands and then he went to Paris for at least six months when he couldn't but have seen and been influenced by the art of the graphic form which was the basis of his early training and lifelong art practice. The Fiddler is a very skilled rendering of an image laden with memories of material folk culture, but imbued with a deeply felt sense of the subject seen through a small scale of colour ranges. The Fiddler's Hat is a repeat of the scumbled colour on the window frame and doorway in the background, keeping the eye level high in the picture plane and then by using the bow of the fiddle creates in an impressionist way the visual element of perspective leading the viewer into the composition. This is a work of great skill and charm and allied to simplicity of means with sgraffito and using oil and crayon gives the essential lightness of touch which is a hallmark of the artist. Ciar?n MacGonigal, December 2008

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