James Arthur O'Connor (1792-1841)
Rocky Landscape with Figure (1840)
Oil on canvas, 35 x 45cm (13¾ x 17¾")
Signed with initials and dated 1840

Provenance: Collection Chidley Coote, Dublin; Lady Woods,...

James Arthur O'Connor (1792-1841)
Rocky Landscape with Figure (1840)
Oil on canvas, 35 x 45cm (13¾ x 17¾")
Signed with initials and dated 1840

Provenance: Collection Chidley Coote, Dublin; Lady Woods, Marino, Killiney, Co. Dublin, thence by descent
Exhibited: Dublin, Exhibition of Arts, Industries and Manufactures, Exhibition Palace, 1872; Dublin Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, 'O'Connor Centenary Exhibition' 1941, Catalogue No. 48

 

The Romantic movement in early 19th century European painting was a response to the Enlightenment era and its emphasis on reason and logic. It was characterized by a fascination with emotion, imagination, individualism, and the natural world. 

James Arthur O’Connor belongs to the great Romantic movement, a movement that celebrates - in literature, music and especially in painting - creativity and a deep understanding of the power of nature. He was perhaps one of Ireland’s best loved painters of the 19th century until being eclipsed by Walter Osborne and others of the Irish Impressionist school.

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 1821 O’Connor and his wife, Anastasia, 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 the 1985 exhibition in the National Gallery of Ireland, that O’Connor’s work may be divided into three distinct phases – the early topographical paintings, mid-period picturesque and the late romantic works. 

Romantic painters sought to create art that evoked strong emotional responses in the viewer, often through dramatic subject matter, intense colour, and dynamic compositions and O’Connor’s late works, such as the selection in this sale, reflect his abiding interest and fascination in the dramatic, such as the moonlit scene with the ruined castle reaching high above the surrounding trees. The presence of a solitary figure standing on a rocky outcrop and an attendant dog provides dramatic scale. 

Tranquillity is a common theme in these later works and possess a pastoral calm that transforms them into very pleasing compositions which went down very well with the picture buyers of the time. However, by the mid 1830s O’Connor was quite depressed about his lack of sales, complaining in correspondence about the fact that he wasn’t ‘selling a single picture’. 

Solitude too is a feature of pictorial compositions through the 18th and early 19th centuries and is a motif that O’Connor developed in his later work. The Canadian art historian David Solkin made interesting observations in relation to this theme in 1982 when he wrote ‘(It) gives emblematic form to the notion of rural retirement, as a moral activity which allows man the opportunity to study and to become aware of the greatness of God … such a message was designed to appeal to contemporary patrician landowners, who like to think of themselves as virtuous hermits in the private confines of their country estates.’ While O’Connor’s solitary figures, as represented in these present works, may not be seen as aristocratic in any sense, they are representative of the broader family of man, whether a fisherman preparing his rod or an ambulant red-clad countrywoman with bonnet and basket. While O’Connor’s star waned in the later years of his life, his work has continued to have a great appeal, a testament to his enduring power as a painter of timeless natural sublimity. 

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