CHARLES CONDER (1868-1909)
CHARLES CONDER (1868-1909)
CHARLES CONDER (1868-1909)
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I sat up and worked all last night until six this morning trying to do another picture for Browning’s Toccato [sic] & as far as I can tell it promised so well that I shall finish it in oil, to make me feel that it is real, but one should go to Venice I suppose for oneself. Charles Conder (in a letter quoted in Rothenstein, 1938)
CHARLES CONDER (1868-1909)

A Toccata of Galuppi

Details
CHARLES CONDER (1868-1909)
A Toccata of Galuppi
signed 'CONDER' (lower right) and inscribed 'A TOCATTO (sic) OF GALUPPI' (lower left)
watercolour and gold paint on silk laid down on board
11¼ x 8 in. (28.5 x 20.5 cm.)
Executed circa 1900.
Provenance
Pickford Robert Waller (1849-1930).
Mrs Pickford Waller.
with The Fine Art Society, 1970, from whom acquired by the late Barry Humphries.
Literature
F. Gibson, Charles Conder: His Life and Work, London, 1914, illustrated pl. XXXIV.
J. Rothenstein, The Life and Death of Charles, London, 1938, ‘List of Paintings and Drawings’, pp. 179-181, 282, illustrated facing p. 182.
T. Sato and L. Lambourne (eds), The Wilde Years: Oscar Wilde and the Art of His Time, London, 2000, p. 98 ((illustrated, ‘One of Conder’s finest works, inspired by a poem by Robert Browning with the same title, which describes the mood of melancholia conjured by the music of the eighteenth-century Venetian composer Baldassare Galuppi …’).
A. Galbally, Charles Conder: the last Bohemian, Melbourne, 2002, pp. 213-4, 224, illustrated facing p. 206.
A. Galbally and B. Pearce, Charles Conder, Sydney, 2003, pp.152-3, and 195, no.75, illustrated p.153.
Exhibited
London, Carfax Gallery, Oil Paintings and Paintings on Silk by Charles Conder, December 1900.
London, Barbican Art Galleries, The Wilde Years: Oscar Wilde and the Art of His Time, October 2000-January 2001, cat.54.
Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Charles Conder, June-August 2003 (travelling to Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, September-November 2003 and Adelaide, Art Gallery of South Australia, November 2003-January 2004), no.75.

Brought to you by

Benedict Winter
Benedict Winter Associate Director, Specialist

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)

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