CHARLES CONDER 1868-1909

Oil on canvas
Signed and dated '89 lower left

PROVENANCE
Taken by the artist to England in April 1890 and left with his guardian, Mrs Frederick Pryce, before passing to his niece, Hazel Lillie; thence by descent to her granddaughter, in England
EXHIBITED
Studio Afternoon, preview of works for VAS, Melbourne Chambers, Collins Street, Melbourne, 17 April 1889
Winter Exhibition, Victorian Artists' Society, Melbourne, May 1889, cat. 28, reproduced on catalogue cover, as 'Hot Wind'
REFERENCE
'Art and Artists', Table Talk, Melbourne, 26 April 1889, p. 5; 10 May 1889
The Argus, 4 May 1889
Melbourne Punch, 16 May 1889, caricature reproduction of the painting titled 'Boiling the Billy'
F. J. Broomfield, Centennial Magazine, 5 July 1889, p. 887
Table Talk, 2 August 1889, p.7, an apparently mistaken report that the painting had sold
Frank Gibson, Charles Conder: His Life and Works, The Bodley Head, London, 1914, pp. 28, 94, pl. III, illus.
William Moore, The Story of Australian Art, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1934, vol. I, p. 73
John Rothenstein, The Life and Death of Conder, J. M. Dent, London, 1938, pp. 30, 32
Bernard Smith, Australian Painting, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1962, pp. 97-98
Ursula Hoff, Charles Conder, His Australian Years, National Gallery Society of Victoria, Melbourne, 1960, cat. 54, pp. 10, 18, 25
Ursula Hoff, Charles Conder, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1972, cat. C83, pp. 40, 103
Robert Hughes, The Art of Australia, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1970, p. 73
Mary Eagle, The Oil Paintings of Arthur Streeton in the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1994, p. 43, illus.
Mary Eagle, The Oil Paintings of Charles Conder in the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1997, p. 43
Ann Galbally, Charles Conder, the last bohemian, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2002, pp. 41-42
Ann Galbally, Barry Pearce et al., Charles Conder, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2003, pp. 26, 27, 66, 84

Until now, the whereabouts of this truly remarkable Australian Symbolist painting has been 'one of the great Conder mysteries'.(1) Painted during the great Victorian drought of 1888-89, when the young artist had moved from Sydney to Melbourne to join the 'Heidelberg School' impressionists, Hot Wind was 'the most talked about picture executed by Conder during his Australian period'.(2)

Conder himself described Hot Wind as 'the best work I have done'. In the painting, he symbolises a scorching Australian summer westerly in the figure of a beautiful but dangerous woman, half-nude in her exotic drapery, lying in a parched riverbed and breathing heat from a flaming brazier across the plains towards a distant town. A serpent coils towards her. The landscape is almost entirely bleached by hot sunlight. The palette is mostly pastel shades: gorgeous pinks and blues on cream and gold, with a few reeds the last remaining vestige of green, and touches of rich rose madder warming the cliff face and around the figure's feet.
Charles Conder was born in England but spent his early childhood in India while his father worked as a railway engineer. He was sent back to England to school with an elder brother, following their mother's death, leaving their only sister, Alice, with their father and his new wife. Then at sixteen, perhaps to discourage any thoughts of a career as an artist, he was sent to an even further outpost of the British Empire - to Australia, to work for his uncle William Conder, Chief Trigonometrical Surveyor for New South Wales. He arrived in Sydney in June 1884.
Conder's time as a surveyor was brief. His uncle William was sympatheti