La Rose du Ciel, Cassis: The Story Behind Roderic O'Conor's Painting
If you have searched for Roderic O'Conor's "Roses at Cassis", the picture you want is almost certainly La Rose du Ciel, Cassis, painted around 1913 and now in the National Gallery of Ireland. We could not find an O'Conor painting actually titled "Roses at Cassis"; La Rose du Ciel translates as "the rose of the sky", and it is the Cassis picture with a rose in its name.
What the painting is
The National Gallery's catalogue records it as oil on canvas, 75 x 93 cm, signed lower left "O'Conor", and dated c.1913. It was shown at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1913 (no. 1594). Our print shows a pink-walled house set behind a pine tree in a sunlit garden: the Mediterranean in warm, saturated colour. The catalogue entry does not explain the title, so we will not guess at it.
O'Conor in Cassis
O'Conor, born in Roscommon in 1860 and based in France for most of his adult life, went south to Cassis in 1913. A catalogued letter in the National Gallery's archive, dated 12 October 1913 and written to the critic Clive Bell, is headed from the Villa Marguerite, Cassis. In it he talks of subletting a villa belonging to Henri Manguin, says he must keep his own until 1 January, and mentions that few painters were in the town apart from Manguin. He calls Robert Delaunay "the only new talent who seems to promise anything" and admits he has been living idly but is going back to work. It is a small, human glimpse of the months in which these pictures were made.
He had been painting this way for twenty years. From about 1892 he built pictures from thick, parallel bands of unmixed colour, a method that predates the Fauves, as our longer piece on O'Conor explains. In the south the same method meets stronger light.
Where the painting went
After O'Conor died in 1940 he left close to a thousand canvases in his studio. A sale at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris in 1956 brought them to the market, and this picture passed through London dealers and the P.F. Scott collection (Sotheby's, 1980) into a private Irish collection. The National Gallery of Ireland bought it at the Adam's sale in Dublin in May 2000.
A second Cassis picture
The same year gives us Landscape, Cassis, also dated to 1913. Hung together, the two make a good pair of Provençal views.
Hanging O'Conor at home
The Cassis pictures suit a plain wall in a room that gets daylight, where the warm colour can do its work. A black or oak frame suits them. If you prefer something earlier and more still, Flowers, Bottle and Two Jugs, from his early 1890s Pont-Aven years, brings his flower painting onto the same wall.
Keep exploring
The full set is in the Roderic O'Conor collection, and his biography is on the O'Conor artist page. For the wider picture, see Ireland's Great Painters or browse the whole Irish art prints range.