Conder sketching at Julian's Atelier in 1890

'The Académie Julian was a congeries of studios crowded with students, the walls thick with palette scrapings, hot, airless and extremely noisy. … To find a place among the closely-packed easels and tabourets was not easy. It seemed wherever one settled one was in somebody’s way.’ (W. Rothenstein, Men and Memories, London, 1938, pp. 36-7). Conder drew and painted from live models here through 1890, transferring to Cormon’s studio on the boulevard de Clichy in early 1891. Full of expatriate students, Conder soon relinquished the Paris studios and went native, embedding himself in bohemian Montmartre, ‘clearing out from the English, American and Australian contingent, who stuck solidly to their studies, and betaking himself to the congenial society of young Frenchmen at Montmartre who speedily learned to idolise him.’ (as John Longstaff, his fellow student at Julian’s, reported disapprovingly in the Argus, 29 August 1895).