James Arthur O'Connor c.1792-1841

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A Sunlit Wooded Landscape with Figures on a Path Leading to a Lake

Oil on canvas, 45.5 x 62 cm.
Signed and dated ‘J. A. O'Connor 1825’

The mid-1820s was a period of both consolidation and on-going experimentation in O’Connor’s landscape art. He had arrived back in London by early 1822 and soon met with not inconsiderable success with his pictures exhibited at the Royal Academy and the British Institution. A sketchbook of 1822 (National Gallery of Ireland) shows his travels around the south of England in search of subject matter while in 1824 he experimented with etching. O’Connor was an artist in constant need of inspiration from the physical world. He expressed this eloquently in relation to the Irish landscape that he loved so well: ‘I am about [to go] to the wild and beautiful scenery of my native country to refresh my memory, and get some studies to help me in future exertion of my profession – I know I will be benefited by a sight of the grand...scenery that I will meet with in Ireland and hope to show it on canvas’. Through the 1820s he continued to paint Wicklow landscapes. In 1825, in a work in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, he revisited the Westport subject matter with which he had engaged in the previous decade. In the present peaceful – and very appealing – landscape, again of 1825, memories of Ireland are again clear, if less topographically specific. By this date O’Connor was living in Hampstead close to John Constable.

This is one of a series of generally serene compositions showing travellers on a path by a wood including a work of the following year in Nottingham Castle Museum in which the smallest hint of a change in the weather shown here has become more pronounced. Here the fall of light through the trees offers a complex pattern of recession, with the tiny figures at the far end of the path catching the eye only after it has dwelt on the sunlit rocky outcrops and the vibrant red costume of the man in the foreground. The quiet sense of harmonious balance that O’Connor achieves here pleasingly contrasts to the sturm und drang of some of his more sublimely romantic works. It is a measure of his great – and still arguably underappreciated – achievement as a landscape painter that he could excel in such different modes, or registers, of the genre.