Charles Conder

Goupil Gallery, London
Judge Evans, purchased from the above
Bequest to Mrs F.L. Evans
Goupil Gallery, London
Private collection, United Kingdom
William Darby, London
Private collection, Spain; purchased from the above

The Judge Evans Collection, Goupil Gallery, London, May - June 1918, cat. 52 (as Spring – Brighton)
Ten English Impressionist Paintings (1884-1919), William Darby, London, 2-19 April 1974, cat. 2 (as Spring – Brighton)

John Rothenstein, The Life and Death of Charles Conder, London: Dent, 1938, p. 269

The work has an old wax lining (see photos). Under ultra violet light there is a jagged diagonal line of retouching in the central sky (above the two figures with the pram). It measures appox 0.5 x 6cm. There are approximately four to five various areas of re-touching along the top frame rebate the largest being 0.5 - 4cm. long approx. There is also scattered retouching along the lower and side rebates and a couple of minor areas in the sky. There are also possibly some older areas of reotuching in the sky and a minor 1cm. approx area of retouching to the lower right hand corner above the bollards and chain and also a vertical line in the lower left hand corner approximately 3cm. in length. The work as recently received a light surface clean by David Stein.
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Conder's plein-air paintings of the early 1900s are often seaside views: of the promenades and beaches of the Normandy coast in France, and of Swanage, Brighton and Newquay in England. The present work is a fine example, and probably dates from November 1905, when the artist and his wife Stella visited Brighton, staying at the grand Royal Albion Hotel on the waterfront.

Ann Galbally has written that 'the conjunction of sky, sea and shore had always proved irresistible to Conder, and in spite of the most appalling late autumn weather he revelled in painting nature at her most basic from his hotel window. There are at least five oils dating from this stay, all of them showing a similar scene of the quayside – a small pier jutting out into the sea and the figures of passers-by struggling against the wind and the rain. Sky and sea are differentiated only by texture. The promenade glistens in the low light. The scene is elemental – exactly what Conder loved beach scenes for. To him there was something about the conjunction of earth, sea and sky that leached out all extraneous meanings from the landscape. He wrote to Will [Rothenstein] of his feelings: "I never saw anything so beautiful as the sea today. It is nearly always so here – but today it made one think about Whistler it was so wonderful."'¹

Two of these Brighton works ( A November day at Brighton,XXX and Windy day at Brighton, Tate) were included in his December exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, but the Athenaeum critic evidently much preferred the wash on silk fantasies to 'the heavy, clogged and resisting surface of Mr Conder's oils.' Yet the 'opaque and loaded touch which he effects'², the rich, creamy brushstrokes with which he describes the waves and the women in the present work, are precisely what gives these paintings their French Impressionist-Whistlerian vivacity. In Brighton the spare linear-geometric architecture of the picture – pier, balustrade, bench and bollards – is just sufficient to hold the light and the paint. Indeed it is notable that in these Brighton pictures Conder avoids the vulgar pleasure architecture of the recently completed Marine Palace Pier (just out of sight to the left of the picture) in order to focus on atmosphere: a pearlescent sky and verdigris sea hovering above the rose-gold esplanade, with a dozen women and children taking the brisk marine air. It was pictures such as the present work to which Augustus John referred when he said '... I prefer his sea-side pictures painted at Dieppe, Swanage or Brighton. Some of them, in my opinion, are better than anything of the kind by Whistler or anyone else.'³

The painting was formerly owned by William Evans (1846-1918), a Welsh County Court judge who assembled a fine and extensive collection of British paintings and drawings, including works by Charles Keene, Horace Mann, Henry Tonks and G.F. Watts. 

1. Ann Galbally, Charles Conder: the last bohemian, Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2002, pp. 269-270
2.  Quoted ibid., pp. 270, 271
3.  Ann Galbally and Barry Pearce, Charles Conder, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2003, p. 129