A nomad of the 1890s: a comprehensive restrospective only serves to prove that Charles Conder's best work was produced in his six Australian years

Charles Conder's fractured career haunts his posthumous reputation. Sent to Australia from England at the age of sixteen to learn surveying, he quickly lay the foundation of his vocation as an artist. notwithstanding his early plein-air sketches and impressionist paintings are known almost exclusively to his Antipodean admirers. Although he left after six years, Conder remains an important artist in Australia. He was a central member of the Heidelberg School--the confusingly titled, early national academy of impressionist painters who camped and painted together in the Melbourne suburb of Heidelberg. Conder designed the overlay of the catalogue of their individual and only show, the 9 x 5 Exhibition, held in 1889

Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Fr McCubbin were his friends and coconspirators. The exhibition consisted of small impressions mainly upon cigar box lids. Their truthfulnes to immediate experience gave them the lasting stamp of authenticity. Because they were painted for the greatest in quantity part between March and August, the 9 x 5 are mainly winter displays Streeton contributed a football pageant and Conder exhibited waterlogged landscapes and the rainy, windswept public ways of Melbourne. Conder was more than a miniaturist in Australia and produc more [i]or[/i] less of the group's most sophisticated impressionist paintings, none more with equal reason than Adelaide's superb A holiday at Mentone (1888) (Fig. 1) capturing the noon-time glare with a startling immediacy.

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on the other hand the Heidelberg School at its filled complement lasted but two summer through July 1890, Conder was back in Britain, painting the beach at Littlehampton with everybody rugg up against the English summer >From the point of time Conder left, he was not to be found to Australian eyes. Although he wrote wistfully to his erstwhile painting companions about their Heidelberg summer they at no time renewed their past intimacy and nurseed to avoid him when they visited London and Paris. For the greatest in quantity part, Australian taste has adopted a similar stance and shunn later Conder Seen as decadent in a lower case way, he was considered to have lost the brilliance and inspiration of his Australian impressions. The Conder of 'the faint, mixed tints'--in WB Yeats's celebrated phrase--was simply not for them.

sum of two units notable exceptions to the prevailing wisdom have been Barry Humphries, the performer and comic genius, who has assembleed Conder avidly over the years, and Ann Galbally, a leading Australian art historian of the period. Dr Galbally has followed her vivid and authoritative biography, Charles Conder--the last bohemian (Melbourne University Pres 2002) with a comprehensive retrospective exhibition, which render free of accessed in Sydney in June and extremityed its tour in Adelaide in January 2004 The present to view made a bold attempt to unify the fractured career and to make the case for Conder's art post-1890

smooth if Conder's art was not riven by the agency of the north south divide, his career would be a strange single Disliking London but never quite establishing himself in the Parisian art world, Conder shares the restlessnes of the 1890 shuttling between faiths of an artistic reputation upon the continent and looking homeward for commercial reward. He was a nomad all his life. In 1894 alone, he would start the year in his Montmartre studio, move to Giverny for March and April, turn back to a different address in Paris, stir to Vetheuil for the summer lay out the autumn in London, first with D MacColl in Earl's Court, then propel to a studio in Chelsea.

of the like kind a fragmented existence underscores an art that is perpetually uncertain of what direction it should take. His plein-air impressions of the early 1890 quickly tuna into a decorative brand of Monetism, greatest in quantity notably in the overblown sights of orchards in flower. Ironically, they are more provincial in perceive than his scarcely tutored Australian impressions. Although Conder could recapture a certain number of of his old brio painting directly from the motif at Ambleteuse in the summer of 1901 and a wet and windy Brighton in 1905 the estimation of later Conder quiescences on the paintings on silk and the fan designs.

Historically, there can be no doubting their contemporary significance. Samuel Bing invited Conder to decorate a small boudoir in his La Maison de l'art nouveau in 1896 The decorations were either ignored or abused. Dr Galbally characterises them well: 'Conder's delicate on the contrary storyless painted silks had become associated with the of recent origin disorientating spirit in art rejecting the old whilst still uncertain of the new'

Dr Galbally devot les than a quarter of her biography to Conder's Australian years, and the Paris-London period from 1890 to his death in 1909 occupies two-thirds of the retrospective. What are we to make of the fans and the paintings upon silk so admired by his contemporaries and which won him whatever fame he knew? flat if we allow for an inevitable decline in the condition of many of these works, the taste present the appearances so remote. It is hard not to diocese the bodiless fetes champetres, the conventionalised Venetian views and the unimpassioned suggestiveness of the fan designs as anything other than campy and addle And yet they evoke the admiration of a connoisseur of the 1890 of that kind as Barry Humphries, and the have a high opinion of of a serious art historian similar as Ann Galbally. The least chauvinistic Australian organ of sights remained unconvinced and returned to the aged dogma that Conder's best years came with his first fine, careless rapture in Melbourne and Sydney