Charles Conder

Mrs Florence Humphrey, London
Mr R.E.A. Wilson, London
Mr Carlos Peacock, London
Tom Silver Gallery, Melbourne
Purchased from the above in 1984

Charles Conder, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 14 June-17 August 2003; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 6 September-9 November 2003; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 21 November 2003-26 January 2004, cat. 47

Ann Galbally and Barry Pearce, Charles Conder, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1993, p. 119 (illus.)

There is scattered fly-spotting across the surface of the picture and it would benefit from a light clean. The work is otherwise in good stable condition.
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In the late 1890s Conder was constantly on the move between and around England and France. The spring and summer of 1898 he spent in the company of the illustrator and watercolourist Arthur Cadogan Blunt, 'enjoying the heat and purest country air at the place on the Seine near my old haunts', the picturesque villages of Vétheuil, Chantemesle and La Roche Guyon, where he had painted in 1892-1893. Writing to William Rothenstein in London, Conder enthused: 'the Spring is here – the corn is yellowing – the nightingale sings in the garden of this house I occupy with my friend Blunt & we work hard and are cheerful when it doesn't rain.'¹

The present work, an image of a tree in explosive blossom at the centre of a courtyard, has been identified as 'showing the garden and house at Chantemesle ...where Conder stayed with ... Arthur Blunt.'²  The fruit tree in blossom had been a favourite image for the artist since his painting holiday at Griffith's Farm, Richmond in August 1888, the campaign which produced Herrick's blossoms (1888, National Gallery of Australia), Spring time (1888, National Gallery of Victoria) and The farm, Richmond, New South Wales (1888, National Gallery of Victoria). After he left Australia, blossom trees reappeared in his Seine Valley works of the early 1890s such as Springtime (1892, Tate), Morning twilight (1893, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) and Blossoms at Dennemont (1893, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), and they would recur yet again in the impressionist Blossoms – an apple orchard in Brittany (circa 1902, Art Gallery of New South Wales).

It is not surprising that Conder should have been so attracted to the motif, and not just as rococo or japoniste decoration. The delicacy and exuberance and effervescence of spring blossom were echoed in the beauty, excess and brevity of the artist's own life.

The present work is possibly identifiable with a painting (simply entitled Blossoms) which was shown at the first exhibition of the International Society of Sculptors, Paintings and Gravers, London, 1898.

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

1.  Letter, Charles Conder to William Rothenstein, 25 May 1898, quoted in Ann Galbally, Charles Conder: the last bohemian, Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2002, p. 191
2.  Ann Galbally & Barry Pearce, Charles Conder, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2003, p. 119