James Arthur O'Connor c.1792-1841
The Avenue, a View in the Parc de Bruxelles
Oil on canvas, 37 x 45 cm.
Signed and dated ‘J. A. O’Connor 1835’
Literature: Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin, The Painters of Ireland (London 1978) p. 212, illustrated; John Hutchinson, James Arthur O’Connor (Dublin 1985) p. 180, illustrated; Nicola Figgis (ed.), Art and Architecture of Ireland Volume 2 (Dublin, New Haven and London, 2013) p. 396, illustrated
Exhibited: National Gallery of Ireland, James Arthur O’Connor, 1985, no. 78; Gorry Gallery, 17th-20th Century Irish Paintings, December 5th-18th 2010, catalogue no. 7, where purchased by the present owner
O’Connor was a surprisingly adventurous, if occasionally unlucky, traveller. From May 1826 he spent a year working in Belgium ‘and there painted and disposed of many pictures’ however ‘his success was clouded; for while in Brussels he was swindled of a considerable sum of money’; this was not the only time such misfortunes happened on his travels. O’Connor also enjoyed an extended sojourn on the continent from September 1832 to November 1833, primarily based in Paris but also touring Germany. In between these dates there is the suggestion of a further trip to Brussels in 1830. O’Connor seems to have benefited from the taste for British landscape painting that an exhibition of Constable’s works had engendered on the continent and, according to his obituary, his paintings ‘obtained very high prices in France and Belgium’.
Among O’Connor’s most famous works is a View of an Avenue. Here, admittedly with some artistic license, O’Connor shows the central avenue of the Parc de Bruxelles. Laid out in the years after 1775 on the ruins of the castle of the Dukes of Brabant, the park is still one of the most attractive green areas in the centre of Brussels, its peaceful, verdant calm now giving little idea of the bitter fighting that had taken place here in the Revolution of 1830, a year, in which as has been noted above, O’Connor may have been in the city. Instead of choosing to paint the more frequently depicted monumental gateway on Rue Royale, O’Connor shows the internal axis focusing on the sculptures of the arts and sciences by Gilles-Lambert Godecharle, completed in 1784.
The painting is dated by O’Connor 1835, the year in which he was in London – unless a further visit to the continent is unrecorded. It is clear that he completed the work based on sketches done on the spot. We know that such drawings existed, as in 1842, just after the artist’s death, several watercolours of clearly related subject matter were exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy. Two were entitled ‘The Park at Brussels’, while others showed the Place du Sablon and the ‘Market at Brussels’. The sheer quality and sparkle of the work make it among the most arresting, and at the same time appealing, of all of O’Connor’s paintings. Its ‘ordered serene quality’ based on ‘strong use of tonality and perspective’ was noted in the recent Yale Art and Architecture of Ireland (AAI, Vol. 2, p. 396, entry by Nesta Butler).