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Roderic O'Conor (1860-1940) Le Châle Bleu or The Blue Shawl (1920-21) Oil on canvas, 64.75 x 54.5cm (25½ x 21½'') Signed. Atelier stamp verso. Inscribed on middle bar of the stretcher, 'No.3 Roderic O'Conor 'Le Châle Bleu' Exhibited: Paris, Salon d'Automne, 1921 (1778) Provenance Hôtel Drouot, Paris, Vente O'Conor, 7 février 1956; with Blache, Versailles, 16 December 1973 and 28 April, 1974: Roland, Browse and Delbanco, London; Mr. J. P. Reihill, Jnr.,Deepwell, Blackrock Literature Roderic O'Conor, 1860-1940, Jonathan Benington, Dublin,1992, Cat. No. 231, p.218 In the Salon d'Automne exhibition of 1921, Roderic O'Conor showed a group of five paintings, three of which were still lifes. His other two exhibits were especially interesting because of their subject matter. One was this portrait of a quite meditative Renée Honta and the other was a rather unflattering self-portrait in which O'Conor depicted himself as a full length figure, standing at his easel and looking very much his age, which was then sixty-one. It was the first and only occasion on which O'Conor showed two distinctly different and separate paintings of himself and his youthful mistress in the same exhibition, thereby drawing attention to the considerable difference in their ages. As was often the case with O'Conor, his motives on that occasion were not clear. For this sensitive portrait of Renée Honta, O'Conor chose to seat her close to the studio window, which was the main light source in his Montparnasse studio. Her serene and rather contemplative expression suggests that O'Conor worked on the portrait over a period of time and may have required more than one sitting in order to achieve a good likeness. The palette knife technique which he has used throughout the painting gives the work a special character and relates it back to much earlier portraits of Breton peasants which he painted during his first visit to Pont-Aven, circa 1887. O'Conor's ability to successfully manage and control the thickly applied paint in this portrait shows his considerable versatility and skill as a painter, a characteristic of his working methods which impressed his closest friends. As he progressed into the 1920's his subject matter changed and he painted a series of ambitious still life paintings in which he further refined and developed his palette knife technique to emphasize the play of light and shade, as he demonstrates in this painting. Dr. Roy Johnston