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Lot Essay
We are grateful to Jonathan Benington for providing us with this and the following entries for Roderic O'Conor.
In the middle years of his life, O'Conor documented the ageing process through a series of uncompromising self-portraits in a head-and-shoulders format, setting his moustached and chiselled features against plain backgrounds. Only on two occasions did he portray his full-length figure, the first being a portrait dating from 1910 in which he stood alongside a large easel, but was otherwise unrecognisable due to the strong back-lighting from his studio windows. The second work is the present one. Unlike its predecessor, it has been executed with consummate attention to detail, and the free-standing easel has been removed to allow more of the studio to come into view. The picture was exhibited two years after it was painted, and would appear to have been intended as a carefully orchestrated statement of the artist's professional standing.
Eye-witnesses recall O'Conor's studio at 102 Rue du Cherche-Midi in Montparnasse as being dark and gloomy, a great big barn of a place with stacks of canvases lining the walls, furnished sparsely with the few chairs and tables he required for the comfort of himself and his models. The accuracy of these reports is born out by Self-portrait holding palette. It is an honest likeness of himself in working clothes holding the tools of his trade, emerging from the gloom with the aid of side-lighting, and confronting the viewer with the withering honesty of a latterday Rembrandt.
In his still-lifes and figure subjects of the 1920s, O'Conor made great play of light-dark contrasts, while in his letters he extolled the virtues of the Old Masters and their apologists, 'with their mouths full or chiaroscuro and morbidezza'. This development is anticipated in the present picture, in which the slanting light glances across pots, chairs, tables and canvases, lifting them gently out of the shadows, acknowledging their presence without allowing them to become a distraction from the main focus of the composition: the figure. The latter is executed with considerable bravura and painterliness, especially in the highlights down the right-hand side of the figure. These impasted areas help to give the figure a physical palpability that is the stronger for being placed next to the carefully modulated paintwork of the background.
The artist's lean, slightly craggy freatures recall the description of the artist Clutton (who was modelled on O'Conor) in Somerset Maugham's novel, Of Human Bondage. It should be noted that the novelist and the Irishman took an intense dislike to each other, hence the unflattering tenor of Maugham's lines:
'an enormous nose, a face so long that it reminded you of a horse ... He was long and desparately thin; his huge bones seemed to protrude from his body; his elbows were so sharp that they appeared to jut out through the arms of his shabby coat'.
Maugham foresaw Clutton in twenty years 'bitter, savage and unknown'. Whilst the ageing O'Conor could certainly be described as unknown (self-promotion was anathema to him), what we know of his circumstances suggests that Maugham's prediction of a bitter future was some way off the mark. Telltale signs may even be found in Self-Portrait holding palette:- to the right of the artist's head, suspended from a roofbeam, is the sculpted head of a woman seen in profile. She appears to look directly across at the artist, mere coincidence perhaps, but the mask-like nature of the head enables it to be identified as a sculpted portrait of the artist's young mistress, Renée Honta (O'Conor did a painting showing the head in progress of being made). By 1919, despite an age difference of 34 years, the two were already on intimate terms. As Clive Bell put it, she 'mitigated the painful loneliness of his old age'; they got married in 1933.
The present work was featured in a documentary film Le Voyage (The Life of Roderic O'Conor), narrated by Andrew Sachs, in 1993.
J.B.
In the middle years of his life, O'Conor documented the ageing process through a series of uncompromising self-portraits in a head-and-shoulders format, setting his moustached and chiselled features against plain backgrounds. Only on two occasions did he portray his full-length figure, the first being a portrait dating from 1910 in which he stood alongside a large easel, but was otherwise unrecognisable due to the strong back-lighting from his studio windows. The second work is the present one. Unlike its predecessor, it has been executed with consummate attention to detail, and the free-standing easel has been removed to allow more of the studio to come into view. The picture was exhibited two years after it was painted, and would appear to have been intended as a carefully orchestrated statement of the artist's professional standing.
Eye-witnesses recall O'Conor's studio at 102 Rue du Cherche-Midi in Montparnasse as being dark and gloomy, a great big barn of a place with stacks of canvases lining the walls, furnished sparsely with the few chairs and tables he required for the comfort of himself and his models. The accuracy of these reports is born out by Self-portrait holding palette. It is an honest likeness of himself in working clothes holding the tools of his trade, emerging from the gloom with the aid of side-lighting, and confronting the viewer with the withering honesty of a latterday Rembrandt.
In his still-lifes and figure subjects of the 1920s, O'Conor made great play of light-dark contrasts, while in his letters he extolled the virtues of the Old Masters and their apologists, 'with their mouths full or chiaroscuro and morbidezza'. This development is anticipated in the present picture, in which the slanting light glances across pots, chairs, tables and canvases, lifting them gently out of the shadows, acknowledging their presence without allowing them to become a distraction from the main focus of the composition: the figure. The latter is executed with considerable bravura and painterliness, especially in the highlights down the right-hand side of the figure. These impasted areas help to give the figure a physical palpability that is the stronger for being placed next to the carefully modulated paintwork of the background.
The artist's lean, slightly craggy freatures recall the description of the artist Clutton (who was modelled on O'Conor) in Somerset Maugham's novel, Of Human Bondage. It should be noted that the novelist and the Irishman took an intense dislike to each other, hence the unflattering tenor of Maugham's lines:
'an enormous nose, a face so long that it reminded you of a horse ... He was long and desparately thin; his huge bones seemed to protrude from his body; his elbows were so sharp that they appeared to jut out through the arms of his shabby coat'.
Maugham foresaw Clutton in twenty years 'bitter, savage and unknown'. Whilst the ageing O'Conor could certainly be described as unknown (self-promotion was anathema to him), what we know of his circumstances suggests that Maugham's prediction of a bitter future was some way off the mark. Telltale signs may even be found in Self-Portrait holding palette:- to the right of the artist's head, suspended from a roofbeam, is the sculpted head of a woman seen in profile. She appears to look directly across at the artist, mere coincidence perhaps, but the mask-like nature of the head enables it to be identified as a sculpted portrait of the artist's young mistress, Renée Honta (O'Conor did a painting showing the head in progress of being made). By 1919, despite an age difference of 34 years, the two were already on intimate terms. As Clive Bell put it, she 'mitigated the painful loneliness of his old age'; they got married in 1933.
The present work was featured in a documentary film Le Voyage (The Life of Roderic O'Conor), narrated by Andrew Sachs, in 1993.
J.B.