Lot Essay
‘Conder’s watercolour, exhibited at Carfax in 1900, depicts a beautiful young woman disrobing before an elaborately coiffed and gowned older woman in an elegant Venetian apartment, watched by an old crone with a skull-like death’s head – the same that appears in Esther’s suicide chamber in his earlier Balzac lithograph. The watercolour is an allegorical image of youth, beauty and death. Its mood is chillingly elegiac. Conder’s references to Browning’s poem are elliptical rather than direct. Haunted as he was at this time by his own physical disintegration, he knew more than most:
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing has to stop?
The late 1890s saw Conder’s imaginative work at its peak.’
(A. Galbally, op. cit., 2002, p.214)