Maisons Rouges à Pont-Aven – Roderic O'Conor

Pont-Aven, circa 1894–95. Village scenes are rare in O'Conor's Breton work — he generally preferred the open countryside on the fringes of the artists' colonies where he worked, away from interruption. Here, though, rows of red rooftops climb a sun-struck hillside, their sagging eaves and stubby chimneys folding into the landscape around them.

The brushwork is loose and undisguised, laid down quickly outdoors, likely in one or two sittings — the whole surface, sky and foliage included, charged with the heat of what looks like a midday sun. O'Conor had recently lent his own studio at Lezaven to Paul Gauguin, who was recovering from a broken ankle sustained in a dockside fight at Concarneau, a fight O'Conor had taken part in himself. Gauguin's exaggerated colour, on show in paintings like David's Mill at Pont-Aven from that same summer, clearly left its mark here — yet O'Conor stops short of Gauguin's flat, hard-edged Synthetism, holding instead to the more painterly, expressive handling he had developed since 1892. Even traces of his earlier Van Gogh-inspired “striping” survive in the sky and rooftops. As the critic Clive Bell later put it, Gauguin's “strength of character and convincing style of talk” made “a deep impression on the young, or youngish Irishman” — but O'Conor never fully gave up his own principles.

Roderic O'Conor (1860–1940) was born in County Roscommon and became one of the few Irish painters working at the centre of the Pont-Aven school alongside Gauguin. His work hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland, the Tate, and major collections worldwide.

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