La colline noire 

Roderic O'Conor painted La colline noire, or The Black Hill, with oil on canvas. O’Conor was an Irish painter who spent much of his career in France, and this landscape shows the influence of the Post-Impressionist painters he met there. The scene appears to be a cultivated field in the French countryside. The fields and the sky take up much of the canvas and appear to be given equal importance in the composition. O’Conor's brushstrokes are choppy and unblended, which was very fashionable at the time, but he does not use the especially vibrant or clashing colors of the Fauves or other avant-garde artists. Instead, O’Conor seems to have focused on capturing the way light plays across the land on a cloudy day, which was a central concern of the Impressionists, but his technique, composition, and subject matter are unique to him. Art historians use archival sources, letters, journals, and exhibition reviews to better understand the context in which an artwork was created and displayed, which gives us a deeper understanding of its meaning.