Red Rocks, Brittany

In summer of 1898 O'Conor visited Pont-Aven in Brittany, where he would remain for the next five years and which provided a rich source of inspiration for his paintings. At around this time, he began a series of seascapes in which he responded to the primal energy created by the sea at the rocky Penmarch peninsula at the coastal village of St Guénolé, and where he lived for several months in a hotel beside the lighthouse. By the summer, he had moved onto the Belle-Ile, one of the largest of the Breton islands and popular with artists, such as Monet, Slewinski and John Peter Russell, the Australian artist who became a friend. Discussing this fertile period of O'Conor's landscape painting, Jonathan Benington (op. cit., pp. 81-82) comments, 'The Irishman studied the way the angry sea pounded the land, churning itself into whirlpools of foam and spindrift ... Sometimes he was moved to paint just an expanse of sea and sky, eliminating the foreground so as to create a greater sense of immediacy ... As the series continued, O'Conor allowed the naturally red rock-formations of the Breton coast to dominate his compositions, painting them in heightened shades of crimson and orange. By using colour arbitrarily, for its own sake, he obtained a degree of abstraction which anticipated that of the Fauves five years later. The brilliant, flattened hues of the Promontory, Brittany (1898-99, Bristol Museums and Art Gallery), for instance defy comparison with the work of his contemporaries, excepting perhaps a few pictures by Gauguin and the Nabi'.