Raising the curtain on Barry Humphries’s collection of art and literature — in which Wilde, Beardsley and Conder jostle for centre stage
The Australian showman was a passionate collector, with a particular fondness for the louche literati of 1890s London and the paintings of his fellow antipodean Charles Conder. Jonathan Bastable trains the spotlight on the objects he treasured

Left: Max Beerbohm’s Portrait of Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) (estimate: £6,000-8,000) and Abel-René Philippe’s bronze Before the Bath (£2,000-3,000), both offered in Barry Humphries: The Personal Collection on 13 February 2025 at Christie’s in London. Right: Barry Humphries. Photo: © Michael Birt via Getty Images
Among the many interesting things to be found in Barry Humphries’s library was a handwritten document consisting of four sheets of quadrille paper. It is a topological diagram of the walls of the library itself. The horizontals and verticals of the bookcases are neatly ruled in red pencil, and in each rectangular space is written — less neatly — which authors or subjects occupy the corresponding shelf.
Three of the sheets of paper have headings: ‘Main Wall’, ‘Spookies Wall’, ‘Wilde Bookshelves’. The fourth page is not titled, but contains a sketch of Hanns Pellar’s Libelle, the painting that hung to the right of the door. Even in cartoon form, Libelle is instantly recognisable: the figure holds a dark little fan at her waist, and the conical coiffure on her round head looks like a florentine wafer planted in a scoop of ice cream.
What purpose did this schematic serve? Humphries was too much the bibliomane not to know what was in his sanctum and exactly where to find it. We cannot ask him — but whatever the original reason for the book-maps, they now look like a picture of his own intellectual preoccupations, a cartographic survey of his mind.

Humphries’s library, with Hanns Pellar’s conversation piece Libelle, from 1910 (estimate: £50,000-70,000). Beneath it is Aubrey Beardsley’s pen-and-ink design for the back cover of The Yellow Book, vol. 1 (£20,000-30,000). The Austrian patinated bronze and iridescent glass table lamp is by Gustav Gurschner and Loetz Witwe, circa 1900 (£3,000-5,000)
The subjects that fascinated him most loom largest, and are labelled in spaced-out capitals like the continents on a globe: ‘POETRY’, ‘THE 1890S’, ‘WILDEANA’. Adjacent areas of interest usually share a border on the page, while other subjects are scattered across the charts like overseas territories: ‘Fleurs du Mal’, ‘Sexual Diversity’, ‘Siegfried Sassoon’.
It seems right that some artworks are present on the pages (besides Libelle, there is a drawing of the tribal mask that stood guard over the Spookies), because paintings and sculptures jostled for space with the books — in the library and throughout Humphries’s crowded house. They were his twin obsessions: words and pictures, pictures and words — nearly all of them dating or relating to the final perfumed decade of the 19th century.
Two personalities dominate Barry Humphries: The Personal Collection, which will be offered at Christie’s in London on 13 February 2025. In books, as his maps make clear, it is Oscar Wilde, whose acolytes and associates kept him company in Humphries’s library as they did so often at Kettner’s or the Café Royal. In art, the leading light is Wilde’s friend and table companion, the Anglo-Australian painter Charles Conder. Wilde had a glass-fronted bookcase to himself, while Conder’s works filled the dining room, and were a pervasive presence elsewhere in the house. Some of Conder’s painted fans hung from the architecture of the bookshelves, obscuring the titles behind. And, in fact, throughout the book-filled spaces there was a sense of layers upon layers.
Charles Conder (1868-1909), Sand dunes, Ambleteuse, 1901. Oil on canvas. 24¼ x 18⅞ in (61 x 50 cm). Estimate: £200,000-300,000. Offered in Barry Humphries: The Personal Collection on 13 February 2025 at Christie’s in London
Unhung paintings leaned against other paintings; postcards were tucked into frames — usually to help tell a story about the bigger picture. Photographs of writers stood sentinel in front of their own books; other snapshots rested at random on the panes of an antique bookcase.
The art constituted the more public half of the collection; it was there for any house guest to admire. But no one went to the library unless Humphries invited them in. And he decided which treasures people got to see, as many of his best books were kept hidden in specially made boxes. In one such box is a copy of the first edition of The Yellow Book, inscribed by Aubrey Beardsley. To Beardsley’s name someone has added ‘…who was an unwholesome and incompetent fellow’.
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Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898), The Yellow Book: An Illustrated Quarterly, Volume 1. Elkin Mathews & John Lane, circa 1894. Estimate: £4,000-6,000. Offered in Barry Humphries: The Personal Collection on 13 February 2025 at Christie’s in London
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Oscar Wilde (1864-1900), Salomé. Drame en un acte. Paul Schmidt for Librairie de l’Art Indépendant, Paris, and Elkin Mathews & John Lane, London, 1893. Estimate: £40,000-60,000. Offered in Barry Humphries: The Personal Collection on 13 February 2025 at Christie’s in London
Among the Wilde works in the collection is an edition of Salomé in the original French, once owned by Lord Alfred Douglas. Salome was ‘the favourite femme fatale of the fin de siècle’, as the cultural historian Charles Bernheimer has said. Her tale of lust and blood, royalty and morality, is made better by the fact that the Bible leaves plenty to the imagination. Wilde’s poetic playlet both tapped into the 1890s cult of ‘Salomania’ and gave it a huge boost. Humphries’s art collection reflects that late-Victorian obsession. He owned several works that depict Salome, and others that allude tangentially to her story, or seem to.
There are two Beardsleyesque Salomes by René Gockinga. In the first of them, there is more than a hint that she is a man underneath her costume. The second Gockinga Salomé is not exactly feminine either: the figure who clutches the Baptist’s dripping head to herself like a beloved teddy bear is a slim-hipped gamine. A wraith of a Salome depicted by Alastair (aka Hans Henning von Voigt) is as thin and deadly as her samurai sword. John’s head is impaled on its blade like an olive on a cocktail stick, and she inspects it nose to nose as if it were her own reflection.
Franz von Stuck (1863-1928), Der Mörder, 1891. Oil on panel. 19 x 18 in (48.4 x 45.6 cm). Estimate: £100,000-150,000. Offered in Barry Humphries: The Personal Collection on 13 February 2025 at Christie’s in London
Seen as a whole, Humphries’s books and artworks form tangled knots of connection and association. Whatever your starting point, you swiftly find yourself in a cat’s cradle of themes leading from one work to the next.
So Salome naturally points the way to Franz von Stuck’s Der Mörder, the most avowedly Symbolist work of art in the collection. The furies in the painting are literal femmes fatales — female fates and agents of karmic retribution. Loitering on that rainy corner, they bring to mind the streetwalkers that haunted the dreams of so many 19th-century painters.
That female gaze forms a kind of sub-theme within the collection. Eye contact seems to be one of the things that drew Humphries to a portrait, and it often has a powerful allure. Jan Sluijters’s Liggend naakt (Reclining nude) is a properly erotic painting by any measure — the composition and the model’s pose are straight out of Modigliani — but her dark eyes are utterly hypnotic, ‘like black holes burned by torches in a tapestry of Tyre’ (to quote Wilde).
Jan Sluijters (1881-1957), Liggend naakt (Reclining nude), circa 1916. Oil on canvas. 31½ x 40⅝ in (80 x 103.3 cm). Estimate: £70,000-100,000. Offered in Barry Humphries: The Personal Collection on 13 February 2025 at Christie’s in London
Jean Delville’s L'oubli des Passions presents a woman in a less heightened mood: paired with her lover as a Renaissance Madonna, her stargazing is just as intense. The subject of Fernand Khnopff’s sketch Le collier de médailles has smoky, kohl-rimmed eyes that turn her into a kind of Symbolist Sandie Shaw, a time traveller from the 1960s to the 1890s.
Libelle belongs to this group, with her imperious stare and her blue-green lorikeet maquillage. Her haughty demeanour is very much like that of the older lady in Charles Conder’s A Toccata of Galuppi. In this painting, as in most of Conder’s wistful visions of the ancien régime, something strange is going on: what obscure adjustment is that naked servant making to the wide-hooped dress?
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Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921), Le collier de médailles, 1899. Graphite heightened with pastel highlights and a coat of varnish on cardboard. 6⅝ x 4¾ in (17 x 12 cm). Estimate: £70,000-100,000. Offered in Barry Humphries: The Personal Collection on 13 February 2025 at Christie’s in London
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Charles Conder (1868-1909), A Toccata of Galuppi, circa 1900. Watercolour and gold paint on silk laid down on board. 11¼ x 8 in (28.5 x 20.5 cm). Estimate: £8,000-12,000. Offered in Barry Humphries: The Personal Collection on 13 February 2025 at Christie’s in London
Conder loved the 18th century as Humphries loved the 1890s — and that, of course, was not the only parallel between them. Both fled Australia as soon as they could to join a bohemian set in Soho; both, for different reasons, had an interest in extravagant women’s couture; and both had their demons — Humphries survived his and flourished, while Conder succumbed to his. The two men even looked like each other in their dandyish youth: the pointy face and the long lick of dark hair that you see in Max Beerbohm’s caricature of Conder is duplicated in Cecil Beaton’s photographs of the young Humphries.
Humphries could not have been fonder of Conder. This part of the collection is astonishing in its depth and range. It encompasses both aspects of what you might call Conder’s quadrilateral paintings — the fêtes galantes and fantasies, the landscapes and seascapes.
Charles Conder (1868-1909), The beach at Pourville, 1895. Oil on canvas. 18¼ x 21⅞ in (46.5 x 55.5 cm). Estimate: £100,000-150,000. Offered in Barry Humphries: The Personal Collection on 13 February 2025 at Christie’s in London
Conder loved portraying the sea — in Australia, England, France. Many of the ‘marines’, as Conder called these views, contain a distant human presence to give a sense of scale. And they are often the best thing about a work; you could see these lonely figures as miniatures in a huge expanse of plein air, as intimate portraits painted from a very long way off. And when you look at the seaside paintings as a set, you notice that the waters of the English Channel seem always to be warm and blue, whereas the Australian coastline is rendered in pasty greys — a kind of inversion of the meteorological facts.
But maybe there is a psychological truth in this reversal — one that says something about Humphries rather than Conder. There are plenty of summery Australian scenes in Conder’s oeuvre as a whole, but only one in this collection. It is as if the northern hemisphere were the sunnier place in Humphries’s mind, while Oz belonged to a duller and more monotone phase of his life. Perhaps that was reflected, unconsciously, in the Conders he chose to buy.
Charles Conder (1868-1909), Australian landscape, circa 1889-90. Oil on canvas. 5⅝ x 9⅝ in (14.5 x 24.5 cm). Estimate: £50,000-70,000. Offered in Barry Humphries: The Personal Collection on 13 February 2025 at Christie’s in London
Then there are the many fans, which hung high up on the walls looking like individually raised eyebrows. Each one is a narrative arc, a story told on a curve of silk. Their shape and size make for a very particular genre — one that is as strict as an Alexandrine sonnet, as constrained as an LP cover. Conder’s biographer Ann Galbally says that his Watteau-like fans were perceived as modern objects at the time because they ‘articulated the mood of the moment, midway between a nostalgia for things past and a contemporary erotic piquancy’.
A fan is also a form of mask — a portable device for concealing or revealing what can be read on the face. Humphries, like Wilde, seems to have been deeply intrigued by masks and what they connote. On the library mantelpiece, below Sluijters’s nude, he kept a gilded head of Lucifer, glaring blindly like the detached head of the Baptist in all those Salome paintings. Elsewhere, a portrait of the Harlem Renaissance patron Carl Van Vechten, by his assistant Saul Mauriber, offers a masked distortion: a magnifying glass standing in for the fronds of a fan.

In the library, fan designs by Charles Conder are hung beneath the cornicing and around the room (estimates: £2,000-5,000), alongside drawings and watercolours including portraits of Conder by Max Beerbohm (£3,000-5000) and William Rothenstein (£1,500-2,500). Hung above the mantelpiece is William Nicholson’s The Conder Room, 1910 (£15,000-25,000). An overmantel by Conder sits before the fireplace (£4,000-6,000)
And this was not the only collection of masks in Humphries’s house. Tucked out of sight upstairs. away from the library, was a sparkling array of ladies’ spectacles. Pink, yellow and blue, and jewelled like fantastical tiaras, they were stored, tissue-papered and boxed as if they were museum relics. Curated this way, they bring to mind Colombinas, those Venetian demi-masques designed to heighten the glamour and hide the identity of their wearers. Lots of friends and admirers of the owner of the eyeglasses — who, sad to say, is also no longer with us — have remarked that she found her authentic voice only after she took to wearing such ornaments.
Humphries alone could have said why that might be, though Wilde offered a kind of explanation long ago: ‘Man is least himself when he talks in his own person,’ he said. ‘Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.’
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Barry Humphries: The Personal Collection is offered at Christie’s in London on 13 February 2025, with viewing from 7 to 12 February