IRELAND 2010 - Roderic O’Conor

To mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of artist Roderic O’Conor, An Post issued two stamps on 27 May, 2010.

Roderic O’Conor (17 October 1860 – 18 March 1940) was an Irish Painter. O Connor lived fr many year in Paris and his method of painting with textured strokes of contrasting colours owed much to Van Gogh. 

The stamps depict a painting of The Breton Girl, Bretonne, c.1903-1904 (oil on canvas) and a self portrait, 1928, (oil on board). The stamps and first day cover were designed by Ger Garland.

Arguably the greatest of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters in the history of Irish art, Roderic O’Conor was born in County Roscommon in 1860. He trained at both the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art (now the National College of Art and Design) and the Royal Hibernian Academy. In order to gain more experience he moved further abroad and studied at the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Antwerp, Belgium between 1883 and 1884. However, after arriving in France around 1892, Roderic fell in love with the country and remained there for the vast majority of his painting career. While there, he became deeply influenced by the Impressionists, especially the landscape artists such as Pissarro and Sisley. The influence these other great artists had on his work was always adaptive rather than adoptive - his use of bold colours and combinations of them give his work a stamp of real individuality. By 1892 O’Conor’s interest in landscapes brought him to the Breton village of Pont-Aven. It was here that he worked closely with a group 

of artists around the revered Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin, whom he would go on to befriend. Much of O’Conor’s greatest work was painted during these years at Pont-Aven - he developed his striped style of painting, the so-called zebriste technique, which was heavily influenced by Vincent Van Gogh. O'Conor remained in France until he passed away peacefully in Nueil-sur-Layon, in March 1940. These commemorative stamps of his birth, designed by Ger Garland, show a painting of his most famous work, The Breton Girl, painted during his time in Pont-Aven in 1906, and a self-portrait of the artist from 1928.