Waterfall

James Arthur O'Connor's Waterfall of 1838, painted in the final years of his life after his return from a stay in Paris, shows the Irish landscape painter engaging with the wild, rocky waterfall subjects that Romantic painters across Europe treated as emblems of sublime natural power. O'Connor had spent the 1820s in London developing his landscape practice under the influence of both Dutch seventeenth-century naturalism and British Romantic landscape, and his later work became increasingly atmospheric and moody. The waterfall subject connects him to the tradition stretching from Ruisdael's famous Jewish Cemetery and waterfall landscapes through to the British artists who treated Welsh and Scottish waterfalls as sites of rugged sublimity. O'Connor's version has a distinctly Irish flavor, the rocky landscape and brooding sky suggesting the specific character of western Irish topography.

The falling water provides the compositional energy, its white cascade contrasting sharply with the dark rock faces on either side. O'Connor builds the surrounding landscape in warm, atmospheric strokes, the sky gathering with a characteristic Romantic sense of brooding imminence. The palette is moody and deep, the falling water the one zone of pure luminosity.