Charles Edward Conder NEAC (24 Oct 1868 – 9 Feb 1909) was an English-born painter, lithographer and designer. He emigrated to Australia and was a key figure in the Heidelberg School, arguably the beginning of a distinctively Australian tradition in Western art. He was elected to the NEAC in 1900.

Conder was born in London in 1868. He spent some time as a very young child living in India until the death of his mother (aged 31 years) in 1873, when Charles was four. He was then sent back to England and went to a number of schools including a boarding school at Eastbourne, which he attended from 1877. He left school at 15, and his very religious, non-artistic father, against Charles's natural creative inclinations, decided that he should follow in his footsteps as a civil engineer.

 

In 1884, at the age of 16, he was sent to Sydney, Australia, where he worked for his uncle, a land surveyor for the New South Wales government. However he disliked the work, much preferring to draw the landscape rather than survey it. In 1886, he left the job and became an artist for the Illustrated Sydney News, where he was in the company of other artists such as Albert Henry Fullwood, Frank Mahony and Benjamin Edwin Minns. He also joined the Art Society of New South Wales, attended the painting classes of Alfred James Daplyn, and went on plein air painting excursions with Julian Ashton.

 


Departure of the Orient – Circular Quay', 1888 (Art Gallery of New South Wales, public domain)

 

Regarded as perhaps his greatest Sydney painting, 'Departure of the Orient – Circular Quay' (1888)  was the culmination of Conder's new mastery of form and brushwork. A dockside scene, it depicts the bustling harbour and ferry berths at Circular Quay in Sydney Cove at the moment when the Orient has cast off for her voyage to England. It was quickly purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, making it the first of Conder's works to enter a public collection.

 

In Sydney in 1888, Conder met and painted with plein air artist Tom Roberts, then visiting from Melbourne. Later that year Conder moved to Melbourne to join Roberts and his circle of friends, including painter Arthur Streeton. The trio shared studios and frequently painted together en plein air at artists' camps in rural localities around Melbourne. They came to be regarded as the core members of the Heidelberg School movement.

 

In August 1889, Conder, Streeton, Roberts, Frederick McCubbin and Charles Douglas Richardson staged the 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition in Melbourne, establishing themselves as exponents of an Australian variant of impressionism. Conder contributed 46 “impressions” to the show and designed the Symbolist and Art Nouveau-inspired catalogue.

 

Short of cash, the attractive Conder apparently paid off his landlady by sexual means, catching syphilis in the process, which was to plague the later years of his life. During his two years in Melbourne, Conder produced several famous Heidelberg School works, including 'Under The Southern Sun'. This painting shows the burning sunlight and desolation that an Australian drought can inflict. While other Heidelberg School artists born and raised in Australia imbued many of their works with nationalist sentiments, Conder – a believer in the credo of art for art's sake – instead tended to focus on everyday scenes and the pursuit of leisure.

 

In Melbourne, Conder rekindled his association with G. P. Nerli, an itinerant Italian painter and the bearer of new European influences who has been credited with shaping Conder's development. The extent of the influence has been debated, but the fact of it is undeniable.

 

During his Melbourne residence, Conder stayed with Roberts at his Grosvenor Chambers studio, then moved into Gordon Chambers with Streeton and Richardson. In March 1890, in the lead-up to the Victorian Artists' Society's Winter exhibition, the trio staged a show at their Gordon Chambers studio, featuring Heidelberg and "up country" landscapes.

 

Conder left Australia in 1890, and spent the rest of his life in Europe, at first in Britain, then France for extended periods. He moved to Paris and studied at the Académie Julian, where he befriended several avant-garde artists, including Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who painted his portrait and featured him in at least two of his Moulin Rouge works. Conder became linked to the aesthetic movement, mixing with the likes of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. He was also the subject of portraits by William Rothenstein, William Orpen, Jacques-Emile Blanche and Augustus John.

 

In 1895 Conder designed a room within the art gallery Maison de l'Art Nouveau, which opened that year in Paris. Later in 1895, he visited Dieppe, socialising among the artistic community and the English families with their attractive daughters, as described by Simona Pakenham in her study of the English people there in the century before World War I.

 

His friends remembered him as "a sick man, unable to face reality". Despite drunken spells, disreputable company and sporadic output, Conder's powers as an artist won him acclaim. He made a specialism of painting on silk. He excelled on one occasion when he painted a series of white silk gowns worn by Alexandra Thaulow, wife of Norwegian painter Frits Thaulow, while she stood on a table, the gowns becoming "coloured like a field of flowers".

 

Conder married a wealthy widow, Stella Maris Belford (née MacAdams) at The British Embassy, Paris in 1901, giving him financial security. His later works are not nearly as well-regarded critically as his earlier Australian paintings.

 

He spent the last year of his life in a sanatorium and died in 1909 in Holloway Sanatorium of "general paresis of the insane" (in modern terms, tertiary syphilis). In death, Conder's work was rated highly by many notable artists, such as Pissarro and Degas.

 

A major exhibition of Conder's work was organised at the Anthony Hordern Gallery, Sydney in 1927, followed by a retrospective at Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield in 1967 and, more recently, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2003.

 

The Canberra suburb of Conder, established in 1991, was named after him. Comedian Barry Humphries was a major aficionado and collector of the artist, and at one time had the world's largest private collection of Conder's work

 

Collections

  • Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK
  • City Bradford MDC, UK
  • Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford, UK
  • Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston Upon-Hull, UK
  • Glasgow Life, Scotland, UK
  • Glasgow Museums Resource Centre (GMRC), Glasgow, Scotland, (UK)
  • Government Art Collection, UK
  • Leeds City Art Gallery, (LeedsMuseums and Galleries), Leeds, UK
  • Lotherton Hall, Leeds Museums and Galleries, Yorkshire, UK
  • Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester, UK
  • Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK
  • National Museum of Cardiff, (Amgueddfa Cymru), Wales, UK
  • National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
  • Tate Britain, London
  • The Cautauld Collection (Samuel Cautauld Trust), Somerset House, London
  • The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK
  • The Higgins Bedford, (The Higgins), Bedford, UK
  • The Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, Carlisle, UK
  • Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS & FURTHER READING