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Lot Essay
Charles Conder arrived in Sydney from London on the S.S. Windsor Castle in June 1884. His move was encouraged by his father who, in a vain attempt to discourage his son from pursuing an artistic career, had arranged for him to be apprenticed to his brother, Conder's uncle, who worked as a Surveyor in the Lands Department for the New South Wales Government.
For almost three years, Conder attempted to fulfil his father's ambitions, working first under his uncle and subsequently at surveying camps around the country. Despite his father's protests, the young Conder was irresistibly drawn to artistic pursuits, which in 1887 resulted in promotion to the rank of illustrator in an architect's firm. Towards the end of 1887, drawings regularly appeared in the Illustrated Sydney News signed 'C.E.C.': a legacy of his position as a freelance graphic artist.
During 1887-1888 Conder studied painting under A.J. Daplyn at Sydney's Royal Society, and after moving to Melbourne in October 1888 continued his studies at the National Gallery Art School, tutored by Frederick McCubbin. During his eighteen-month sojourn in Melbourne, Conder shared a studio with Tom Roberts, and through this came also to associate with Arthur Streeton and Frederick McCubbin, with whom he travelled to Box Hill and Mentone.
From these early days, characteristics of his art to be found at the end of his career can be found. In A Holiday at Mentone (1888, AGSA) Conder's tendency towards focussing on choreographic rather than structural elements in his paintings can be perceived: "characters frozen at the parting of a curtain, waiting for the music to fade, presaging an improbable interaction The composition is divided into clear rectangular components, conveying the ambience of flatness, not entirely modernist like a painted backdrop for a vaudeville theatre." (A. Galbally & B. Pearce, Charles Conder, Sydney, 2003, p.23).
Conder's Figure Study, painted almost 20 years later, recalls these early proclivities towards the vaudevillean. The female protagonists of the scene, draped seductively in rose pink, blue and gold, are positioned as though in tableau, waited on by a shadowy figure emerging stage left, and by an umbrella-carrying servant, perhaps recalling a visit the artist made to Algiers in 1891 while recuperating from a debilitating outbreak of syphilis.
In Figure Study, a shift can be perceived in the artist's style, from the principally important influence of his Heidelberg School colleagues, particularly Girolamo Nerli and the impressionist style of painting. Instead, perhaps absorbing the milieu in which he found himself during the final years of the eighteenth century, here the artist's style is more reminiscent of the work of French Rococo artist Jean-Antoine Watteau, whose fjtes galantes had experienced a resurgence in popularity during the mid- to late- 1800s.
In Figure Study, the artist's style also bears the hallmarks of his later preference for painting on silk. This provided Conder with a suitably opulent medium upon which to paint his scenes of "amorous liaisons, and the dream of an elegant pastoral life, of an artificial existence, far from the commonplaces of the everyday and removed to a timeless past."
U. Hoff, Charles Conder, Melbourne, 1972, p.64). It also absorbed pigment more readily than canvas or paper, and so provided the artist with a slightly softened line and the capacity to develop the delicate colours for which he has become renowned. In The Meeting, the influence of fin-de-sihcle life in Paris is combined with the freshness and vitality that characterised the artist's work from his earliest days with the Heidelberg School.
For almost three years, Conder attempted to fulfil his father's ambitions, working first under his uncle and subsequently at surveying camps around the country. Despite his father's protests, the young Conder was irresistibly drawn to artistic pursuits, which in 1887 resulted in promotion to the rank of illustrator in an architect's firm. Towards the end of 1887, drawings regularly appeared in the Illustrated Sydney News signed 'C.E.C.': a legacy of his position as a freelance graphic artist.
During 1887-1888 Conder studied painting under A.J. Daplyn at Sydney's Royal Society, and after moving to Melbourne in October 1888 continued his studies at the National Gallery Art School, tutored by Frederick McCubbin. During his eighteen-month sojourn in Melbourne, Conder shared a studio with Tom Roberts, and through this came also to associate with Arthur Streeton and Frederick McCubbin, with whom he travelled to Box Hill and Mentone.
From these early days, characteristics of his art to be found at the end of his career can be found. In A Holiday at Mentone (1888, AGSA) Conder's tendency towards focussing on choreographic rather than structural elements in his paintings can be perceived: "characters frozen at the parting of a curtain, waiting for the music to fade, presaging an improbable interaction The composition is divided into clear rectangular components, conveying the ambience of flatness, not entirely modernist like a painted backdrop for a vaudeville theatre." (A. Galbally & B. Pearce, Charles Conder, Sydney, 2003, p.23).
Conder's Figure Study, painted almost 20 years later, recalls these early proclivities towards the vaudevillean. The female protagonists of the scene, draped seductively in rose pink, blue and gold, are positioned as though in tableau, waited on by a shadowy figure emerging stage left, and by an umbrella-carrying servant, perhaps recalling a visit the artist made to Algiers in 1891 while recuperating from a debilitating outbreak of syphilis.
In Figure Study, a shift can be perceived in the artist's style, from the principally important influence of his Heidelberg School colleagues, particularly Girolamo Nerli and the impressionist style of painting. Instead, perhaps absorbing the milieu in which he found himself during the final years of the eighteenth century, here the artist's style is more reminiscent of the work of French Rococo artist Jean-Antoine Watteau, whose fjtes galantes had experienced a resurgence in popularity during the mid- to late- 1800s.
In Figure Study, the artist's style also bears the hallmarks of his later preference for painting on silk. This provided Conder with a suitably opulent medium upon which to paint his scenes of "amorous liaisons, and the dream of an elegant pastoral life, of an artificial existence, far from the commonplaces of the everyday and removed to a timeless past."
U. Hoff, Charles Conder, Melbourne, 1972, p.64). It also absorbed pigment more readily than canvas or paper, and so provided the artist with a slightly softened line and the capacity to develop the delicate colours for which he has become renowned. In The Meeting, the influence of fin-de-sihcle life in Paris is combined with the freshness and vitality that characterised the artist's work from his earliest days with the Heidelberg School.