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CHOICE Review

Benington, curator at the Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museums, has written a readable biography that provides welcome illumination of O'Conor's under-appreciated art and contribution to the course of post-impressionism. The excellent color plates (luscious against the monochrome illustrations) accompanying the chronologically organized text demonstrate how his painting anticipated both Fauvism and Synthesism while also responding to the tactile sensuality of Rembrandt and Velasquex. O'Conor's artistic acquaintance and maturation are neatly recounted, together with his activities as a collector, in nine chapters the headings of which revive the Victorian synopsis of contents. Equally conservative, but entirely commendable, are the catalogs of art work by media, efficient endnotes, lists of exhibitions by and of O'Conor, and index. The bibliography is sensibly select, including the pioneering article by Denys Sutton in the November 1960 Studio as well as other monographs, notably Paula Murphy's Roderic O'Conor (Dublin, 1992), and those general studies that it supplements exemplified by J. Campbell's 1984 National Gallery of Ireland exhibition catalog The Irish Impressionists (Dublin, 1984), and K. McConkey's A Free Spirit: Irish Painting 1860-1960 (London, 1990). Capable of attracting a wider readership, it will be of most interest to the professional. R. W. Liscombe; University of British Columbia