Roderic O’Conor

Still Life with Bottles

1892

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Not on display

Artist: Roderic O’Conor 1860–1940
Medium: Oil paint on canvas
Dimensions: Support: 552 × 464 mm
frame: 747 × 658 × 88 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Purchased 1957
Reference: T00133

Display caption

O'Conor grew up in Dublin, where he went to the Metropolitan School of Art. By 1888 he had moved to Paris, and was associated with the American painters also studying there. Like them he visited Grez-sur-Loing to paint, and later went to Brittany for several summers.

This still life is indebted to the intense colouring of Monet's later landscapes. Each area of the subject is painted as a pairing of separate colours. Very few such early paintings of O'Conor's are known. Most are landscape, with a few still lifes, of which this is the most extreme in palette.

Gallery label, September 2004

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Catalogue entry

T00133 STILL LIFE WITH BOTTLES 1892

Inscr. ‘R. O'Conor '92.’ t.l.
Canvas, 21 3/4×18 1/4 (55×46).
Purchased from Roland, Browse and Delbanco (Grant-in-Aid) 1957.
Coll: Purchased by Roland, Browse and Delbanco at the sale of the Atelier O'Conor, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 7 February 1956; there was no detailed inventory, the works being sold in bundles.
Exh: Roland, Browse and Delbanco, March–April 1957 (11).
Lit: Sutton in Studio, CLX, 1960, p.173.
Repr: Tate Gallery Report 1957–8 , 1958; John Rothenstein, The Tate Gallery, 1962, p.258.

This picture was probably painted very soon after O'Conor had made the acquaintance of Emile Bernard, Sérusier and others of the Pont Aven group in 1892.

Published in:
Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, London 1964, II