CHARLES CONDER

The artist
'Australian friend of the Artist', (Rodgers, 1967); a gift from the above
Sir John Rothenstein, CBE, London; a gift from the above
Private collection, London; purchased from the above in 1986
Fine and Important Paintings, Rushton Fine Art, Sydney, 17 November 1987, lot 92
Private collection, Sydney; purchased from the above

Charles Conder, Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, September 1967, cat. 8
Charles Conder, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 14 June - 17 August 1993; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 6 September - 9 November 2003; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 21 November 2003 -  26 January 2004, cat. 30

John Rothenstein, The Life and Death of Conder, Dent, London, 1938, p. 278
Ursula Hoff, Charles Conder, Lansdowne, Melbourne, 1972, cat. C60, p. 102
Ann Galbally and Barry Pearce, Charles Conder, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2003, pp. 66, 100 (illus.), 193

This work is presented in a traditional-style gilt timber frame. This work has not been lined and appears to have the original stretcher with modern keys. There are very fine minor drying cracks in the centre left of picture. UV inspection confirms no retouching. This work is in excellent original condition.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

A '9 by 5' painted après la lettre, this exquisite little canvas has been authoritatively dated to the summer of 1889-90, only a matter of months before the young Charles Conder left Australia for Paris, never to return. The stress and excitement of the 9 by 5 exhibition in August 1889 may have precipitated a return of the syphilis Conder had earlier contracted in Sydney; certainly for the last two months of the year he was, as he put it, 'laid up in bed... though I'm not very bad this time I must lie pretty quiet.'¹  By mid-January, however, he was definitely well enough to return to plein-air painting, and to even more strenuous exercise – on 1 February the Illustrated Australian News published a suite of black and white landscape vignettes by the artist entitled 'A walk from Kew to Heidelberg'.²  Working through February, he had enough paintings for a studio exhibition in early March and for the maximum six entries in the Victorian Artists' Society exhibition at the end of the month.

While there can be no doubts as to the present work's authorship, quality or history, it remains (like its maker) tantalisingly elusive in some aspects of its identity. First, there is the question of its title. The work has been known under the baldly descriptive (and therefore rather unConderesque) denomination Australian Landscape since 1938, when it was titled as such in John Rothenstein's catalogue. At the time of its last sale, in 1987, it was thought that it might be Going Home, from the 9 by 5 Exhibition, though this title has since been assigned to a work (also known as The Gray [sic] and Gold) in the National Gallery of Australia collection.

There is one alternative possibility. When Sophie Osmond visited Conder's city studio in early March 1890, she made particular note of a painting called The Dawn Faintly Dappled, describing it as 'another "grey" picture – one of the daintiest and smallest in the studio.'³ While Mary Eagle has suggested that The Dawn Faintly Dappled may have been the original title of the work now known as The Path from the Woods (1890, National Gallery of Australia), it could as easily fit the present painting. The title is in fact a quotation from Adam Lindsay Gordon's From the Wreck. Gordon's poem includes the lines:

 We crossed a low range sickly scented with musk;
 From wattle-tree blossom – we skirted a marsh –
 Then the dawn faintly dappled with orange the dusk...

which are quite appropriate here, entirely suiting the work's flood-plain setting and its delicate touches of pink and gold sunrise sky.

The second conundrum is geographical. Walter Withers would later recall that Conder's On the River Yarra near Heidelberg, Victoria (1890, private collection), like Arthur Streeton's Still Glides the Stream (1890, Art Gallery of New South Wales) was painted 'on the River Yarra just below Eaglemont where Conder, Streeton, Roberts and myself were camped at the time'⁴, in that slow double-bow of the river Yarra between what are now Waringal Park and the Lower Heidelberg Golf Course. However, unlike On the River Yarra... and Streeton's two swimming hole pictures Spring (1890) and The Bathers (1891), here the river is on the right, so the view is probably more westward, looking back up the hill towards Heidelberg and Mount Eagle.

Quite possibly the picture was painted at close to the same spot as the Late Afternoon ⁵ shown in the 9 by 5 Exhibition (1889, private collection, Sydney). The two paintings share the same overall proportions, the same distant hill and open foreground paddock, even the same distribution of trees, both on the horizon and in the valley. Nevertheless, there are marked differences between the two works. Unlike the previous year, when the colony had been in the grip of drought, and when Conder had painted his dry-symbolist masterpiece Hot Wind (1889, National Gallery of Australia), November-December 1889 saw heavy rains and floods, and the Yarra Valley's paddocks were (pale) green even into high summer.

The present work gives evidence of a parallel and similarly rich artistic ripening. Ann Galbally describes how 'as he moved into the second summer [at Eaglemont]... [Conder's] work matured. Australian Landscape... is a highly poetic response to the area, worked broadly in terms of light and shade to suggest the reach of the valley with just the tiniest figure in the middle distance... The paint handling... is that of a mature artist, secure in his aesthetic and relishing the warm... tonality of his palette.'⁶

At once bright and brooding, the picture's tonal range runs from white and pale rose clouds through the mauve and ultramarine shadowed hill in the middle distance to bituminous darkness in the shadowed river. It has the melancholy lyricism found not only in the poems of Gordon, but also in those of other Conder literary favourites such as Robert Herrick and Robert Browning. It is, as Mary Eagle has described The Yarra, Heidelberg (1890, National Gallery of Australia), 'muted in tone and elegiac in mood... a last, sad song',⁷ and expresses a sweet nostalgia which the artist himself was to articulate six months later in a letter to Roberts:

'I feel more than sorry that [those] days are over, because nothing can exceed the pleasures of that last summer, when I fancy all of us lost the "Ego" somewhat of our natures in looking at what was Nature's best art and ideality. Give me one summer again with yourself and Streeton – the same long evening, songs, dirty plates, and last pink skies. But these things don't happen, do they? And what's gone is over.'⁸

We are most grateful to Ann Galbally for her assistance in cataloguing this work.

1. Charles Conder, letter to Theodore Fink, 31 December 1889, cited in Ann Galbally, Charles Conder: The Last Bohemian, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2002, p. 54
2. The Illustrated Australian News and Musical Times, 1 February 1890, p. 21
3. Quoted in Mary Eagle, The Oil Paintings of Charles Conder in the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1997, p. 64
4. Walter Withers, letter to W.H. Gill, cited in Eagle, op. cit., p. 52, n. 3
5.  See Terry Lane (ed.), Australian Impressionism, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2007, cat. 9.12, p. 167
6. Ann Galbally, 'Plein air painting', in Ann Galbally and Barry Pearce, Charles Conder, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2003, p. 66
7. Eagle, op. cit., p. 52
8. Charles Conder, letter to Tom Roberts, 20 August 1890, cited in R.H. Croll (ed.), Smike to Bulldog: Letters from Sir Artur Streeton to Tom Roberts, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1946, p. 128