Roderic O'Connor is heralded as one of Ireland's most recognizable and beloved expatriate artists. Although he was independently wealthy and had no need to sell his paintings to make ends meet, he did exhibit some of his work publicly during his lifetime, mostly in Paris. It wasn't until his widow's death in 1955 and the sale of her estate a year later that the breadth of his oeuvre became known to the public. ... Torremolinos was painted late in the artist's life on a brief trip to Spain with his wife Renée Honta, and it offers a poetic summation of the artist's career. Numerous landscapes reveal the artist's "passionate love of nature." In a letter dated March 12, 1903, Armand Seguin observed that O'Connor responded first to color rather than line, a fact much in evidence in this painting. Areas of raw canvas reveal no underdrawing--that the artist was painting outdoors in front of the motif, much as Carolus-Duran had taught in the 1880s.

from Snay, The Donald and Marilyn Keough Collection of Irish Art (Notre Dame, 2019)