Sand dunes, Ambleteuse

‘… in the early summer of 1901 [Florence Humphrey] invited Conder to tea – to meet a niece of her husband. This was Stella Maris Belford, a young Canadian widow who was in London with her sister, Mrs Annie Lawson – married to Colonel Herbert Lawson of the Howe, Wallingford, near Oxford. Born in Quebec in 1870, the daughter of Alexander MacAdams, gentleman, she was a young, vivacious brunette at the time of her first meeting with Conder. … Rather lonely and looking for a direction, even a cause, she quickly fell under Conder’s spell. He was immediately struck by her and upon leaving her company on their first meeting declared to those around him, ‘I’m going to marry that woman’.

'Further meetings followed and it was decided to holiday together at Ambleteuse on the Normandy coast in August. Florence, Annie and Stella were joined by Conder. Plein air studies of bathers, the cliffs and the beach were produced by Conder to an appreciative female audience. Conder was happier than he had ever been, making strenuous efforts to stay off alcohol, to exercise and to live according to conventional expectations.

'That summer was to change his life permanently. For it was among this group of cultivated and admiring women that he was to live out the rest of his life.’ (A. Galbally, Charles Conder the last bohemian, Melbourne, 2002, pp.224-25).

‘De ce séjour estival sur nos côtes en juillet et août 1901, il nous reste des oeuvres assez représentatives de Conder: un éventail peint, un portrait de Mrs Belford et un paysage: Les dunes d’Ambleteuse.

'Dans ce dernier tableau, le peintre traduit la séduction des lieux, la lumière d’été qui baigne la plage du Pas-de Calais. L’espace donné par le bleu du ciel, de la mer, occupe les deux tiers du tableau. Dans les notations rapides faites de tons clairs juxtaposés, tout est allusif: les tentes de plage, les silhouettes féminines et les enfants. Le point de vue en légère plongée, ordonné par les verticales des tentes et des personnages, l’oblique de la dune, dispense sa respiration au tableau. Il s’agit d’un travail sur le motif dans lequel l’artiste a rassemblé ses impressions premières sans hésitations ni repentirs et la réussite est complète; un paysage assez rare dans l’oeuvre de Conder.’ (J.C. Lesage, op. cit., p.88-90).