James Arthur O’Connor was born in Quay, Dublin; aside from a few lessons with the noted Dublin artist William Sadler, O’Connor was largely self-taught but went on to become one of Ireland’s finest 19th century landscape painters.
In 1813, O’Connor traveled to London with his lifelong friends and fellow painters George Petrie and Francis Danby but returned to Ireland a short t.mes later to look after his orphaned sisters. His reputation as an artist therefore developed in Ireland, with a series of local landscape paintings for Lord Sligo and Lord Clanricarde. In 1821, O’Connor and his wife Anastatia moved to London and the following year he exhibited at the Royal Academy. Over the course of the decade he travelled across Europe, visiting Belgium, Holland and Germany, and spent several months in the Rhine Valley. However, it was in Paris that he met the German Landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich and produced some of his finest works.
In the exhibition catalogue of the 1985 retrospective at the National Gallery of Ireland, John Hutchinson noted that O'Connor's work may be divided into three distinctive phases: early topographical paintings, mid-period picturesque and late romantic. Indeed, his vision was influenced by the Italian painter Salvator Rosa, and until the end of his career, O’Connor’s dramatic landscapes often included rock outcrops, threatening skies and billowing trees. He certainly justified the critic John Berger’s assertion that landscape can be a metaphor of self-expression.
John Hutchinson’s insights confirm his artist significance:
“O’Connor’s romantic images can speak to us as vitally now as they did to his contemporaries… his picturesque views are idealised, but the romantic paintings provide us with surprisingly direct access both to the artist’s t.mes s and to a genuinely personal perception of life”.