Charles Conder British, 1868-1909

Original owner unknown

Collection of William Grant Buckle (1894-1947), Sydney, purchased in the 1920s; thence by descent

Private collection, Perth

Ursula Hoff, Charles Conder, his Australian years, National Gallery Society of Victoria, Melbourne, 1960, cat. 18

Ursula Hoff, Charles Conder, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1972, cat. C8

Conder’s lovely little River landscape has unfortunately lost its original title. However it may well have been painted near Richmond on the Hawkesbury River, where he worked in the spring of 1887 and again for two weeks in July-August 1888. Very similar soft blue hills are seen in the distance in his The Farm, Richmond of 1888, now in the National Gallery of Victoria. In September 1888 a reviewer for The Sydney Morning Herald observed that of the several paintings Conder sent to the Art Society of New South Wales exhibition, most tended ‘to be golden’. Other critics noted ‘tones of gold and purple’ and ‘brightness and sunshine’. It is tempting to link the present work with ‘A Golden Meadow on the Hawkesbury’, listed in that exhibition.¹

Mary Eagle comments on a distinctive aspect of Conder’s style at this time, the delicate, semi-transparent, watercolour-style of applying oil paint, seen here in River landscape. The whole composition is amazingly simple: the expanse of sky, the pale silhouette of the hills and the almost empty foreground. ‘The technique could be Conder’s approximation of the flat washes of colour in Japanese prints and paintings’.²

The painting’s first recorded owner, W. G. Buckle, also owned Conder’s Herrick’s Blossoms, catalogue number 141 in the famous 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition of 1889 and now in the National Gallery of Australia.

1. The Sydney Morning Herald, 18 September 1888, p. 5 and 19 September p. 12; and see The Daily Telegraph, 17 September, p. 5.

2.. Eagle, M., The Oil Paintings of Charles Conder in the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1997, p. 20.