Roderic O’Conor, R.H.A. (1860-1940)
Seated female nude (£5,000-8,000)
A Seated Female Nude by Roderic O’Conor more than tripled its top estimate at Christie’s sale of Modern British and Irish Art in London today. It sold for £27,500 over an estimate of £5,000-8,000. Early Away by Jack Butler Yeats made £50,000 and William Scott’s Blue Still Life sold for £74,500. Both prices were within estimate.
The O’Conor painting is unusual in that it depicts only the upper torso. The upright pose calls to mind a conventional portrait. A similar approach to painting the female model, combining finely delineated features and heavily textured drapes, is evident in O’Conor’s painting Repos of a fully clothed young woman asleep with a book in her hand. This work was exhibited in Paris in 1905 and purchased by the great Russian collector of modern art, Ivan Morosov, before it entered the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, where it remains to this day. Seated female nude, or Étude as it was originally titled, can also be dated to this period on stylistic grounds and may even feature the same model.
(See post on antiquesandartireland.com for July 11, 2014)