Charles Conder

Lawrence Abrahams (possibly from the artist)
The Magnificent Collection of Australian Pictures made by the Late Lawrence Abrahams, Decoration Co., Melbourne, 16 June, 1919, lot 36
George Page Cooper, Melbourne
The George Page Cooper Collection of Historical Australian Paintings, Old Masters, Bronzes etc., Leonard Joel, 21 - 22 November 1967, addendum
Mrs G.M. Chartres, Melbourne
Australian Paintings, Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 5 November 1980, lot 868
Lauraine Diggins Fine Arts, Melbourne; purchased from the above
David Bremer, Melbourne; purchased from the above
AGC Limited
Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above in 1988
Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above
Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne
Private collection, Sydney; purchased from the above in 1992

Exhibition of art from painters of Heidelberg School of Art, Sir Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder, Fred McCubbin and Tom Roberts... pictures on loan from National Gallery of Victoria, Ballarat Art Gallery, Bendigo Art Gallery, Castlemaine Art Gallery and private collections,First City of Mordialloc Arts Festival, 1965, cat. 36
Golden Summers: Heidelberg and Beyond, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 1985-86
The Australian Impressionists: The Origins & Influences, Lauraine Diggins Fine Arts, Melbourne; Westpac Gallery, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne; St Neot's, Sydney, 1988, cat. 9
Charles Conder, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne;Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2003, cat. 5
Australian Impressionism, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2007, cat. 4.4 (illus)

Frank Gibson, Charles Conder, His Life and Work, Bodley Head, London, 1914, p. 93
William Moore, The Story of Australian Art (2 vols), Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1934, vol. II, p. 27
Ursula Hoff, Charles Conder, His Australian Years, National Gallery Society of Victoria, Melbourne, 1960, cat. 26 (illus. pl.13)
Ursula Hoff, 'Charles Conder', Art and Australia, May 1964, p. 31
Ursula Hoff, Charles Conder, Lansdowne, Melbourne, 1972, cat. C23 (illus. fig. 6)
Jane Clark and Bridget Whitelaw, Golden Summers: Heidelberg and Beyond, National Gallery of Victoria,Melbourne, p. 103 (illus.)
Geoffrey Smith, Arthur Streeton 1867-1943, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1995, p. 46, no. 2
Mary Eagle, The Oil Paintings of Charles Conder in the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1997, p. 24
Ann Galbally and Barry Pearce, Charles Conder, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2003, cat. 5, pp. 44, 74 (illus.)Terence Lane (ed.), Australian Impressionism, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2007, cat. 4.4, pp. 82, 319 (illus.)

The work is framed in a traditional gold frame. There is a 20mm spot of retouching to the upper left of the work, another 5mm spot of retouching in the centre of the painting just above the woman's head, and a further 15mm spot of retouching at the bottom right hand side of the painting against the frame, these are confirmed by the UV inspection. The work is in good stable condition.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

This painting is an immense rarity: a work from the first and freshest period of Charles Conder's career, the magical Australian centennial year of 1888, during which the artist created such perennial favourites such as Coogee Bay (National Gallery of Victoria), Bronte Beach (National Gallery of Australia), Springtime (National Gallery of Victoria), Departure of the 'Orient' - Circular Quay (Art Gallery of New South Wales) and Holiday at Mentone (Art Gallery of South Australia).

The previous year the young Conder had abandoned his training as a surveyor to devote himself to art full-time, taking work as a black and white artist for the Illustrated Sydney News and painting his first, precocious naturalist landscapes at Coogee and on the Hawkesbury River. In this early period of his career the most obvious influences are those of fellow members of the New South Wales Society of Artists and its Sketch Club, most notably Julian Ashton and A.H. Fullwood, as well as lesser lights such as Frank P. Mahoney, Robert Atkinson and G.V.F. Mann. Conder camped and painted with these older men and adopted their Anglo-French plein-airism, 'the new aesthetic of truth to nature.'¹

Particularly significant was the example of that stylish itinerant, Girolamo Nerli, who had brought with him from Florence the manner of Giovanni Fattori and the macchiaioli, the Italian painters of rapid, on-the-spot sketches. The quick sweeps, drags, flicks and scumbles which define the grassy foreground plane in the present work would seem to owe more than a little to Nerli's example.  While Ann Galbally has questioned the degree of influence that Japanese prints had on the young artist,² there is probably a certain amount of fashionable impressionist japonisme in the flatness, vacancy and verticality of the composition. As Mary Eagle has observed, 'clearly [Conder] preferred the free space of dreaming to the grid of conventional perspective.'³ There is certainly a Whistlerian Aestheticism implicit in the work's abstract leaf and flower spots and calligraphic grass lines, in the foregrounding of the title inscription as an element of the composition and in the arabesque silhouette of the trees on the high horizon. The oriental parasol would have been an essential component of the artist's greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Chambers studio décor⁴, his ensemble of 'bric a brac... liberty silks and muslins'5, and the red sunshade is a recurrent motif in Conder's plein-air iconography of the late 1880s.⁶

Also typical is the work's literary title, reflecting the artist's 'love of elliptical, cryptic references.'⁷ Conder was widely-read - Arthur Streeton once noted enviousy that 'he knew all about Browning, Carlyle, Herrick and The Rubaiyat⁸ - and from the same year as The Fatal Colors we find both a painting which consciously references Robert Herrick's seventeenth century poem The Blossoms and the satirical A Taste for Literature, with its paper-eating calf. In the present work, Conder includes a witty allusion to Shakespeare's lines (describing a pale and bloodied dead soldier):

The red rose and the white are on his face

The fatal colours of our striving houses

(Henry VI Part 3, Act 2, Scene 5)

The terminal 's' of the inscription and its Shakespearean origin have been overlooked at times during the painting's history in favour of the more obvious reading, an emphasis on red, the colour of a bullfighter's cape, the 'red rag to a bull.' Frank Gibson's 1914 list even calls the work That Fatal Colour. It is, however, the combination of red and white that is evidently the source of Conder's title, and which more accurately reflects the central figure, with her voguish peppermintstripe dress.⁹ The Wars of the Roses source also suggests a deliberate visual pun within the work, the furled sunshade pointed at the bull recalling the form of a medieval knight's lance. The defensive sunshade also has a more modern resonance, that of the hand of a mechanical dial or trigonometrical pointer. There is certainly a clear geometric structure underlying the work: the line between the red 'arrow' and the bull ricochets off the horizon at right angles, defining the line of the hill as it runs up to the top left of the picture.

However, what is most distinctive about the present work is its bright, story-telling verve. As Julian Ashton once observed. 'Conder loved pretty ladies in beautiful dresses'¹⁰, and the precarious situation of the heroine here provides a charming narrative rationale for a simple frockin-landscape composition. The confrontation of the city fashion-plate and the raw rural reality of the angry bull is typical of the small-scale, ironic drama which Conder so much enjoyed, and which can also be seen in such works as How we lost Poor Flossie (1889, Art Gallery of South Australia). Highly fashionable in style and subject, mordantly witty in narrative and title, The Fatal Colors is a delicious example of the 'rising young artist's... smaller pictures, which show a wonderful conception of colour and great boldness of treatment.'¹¹

1. Ann Galbally, 'Portrait of the Surveyor as a Young Artist: Charles Conder in Richmond and the Hawkesbury Area, 1887-88', in Terence Lane (ed.), Australian Impressionism, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2007, p. 77
2. ibid., p. 78
3. Mary Eagle, 'Friendly Rivalry: Paintings of Waterside Sydney, 1888 and 1890', in Lane, op. cit., p. 108
4. Gilbert and Sullivan's 1881 operetta Patience, or Bunthorne's Bride satirised Oscar Wilde and British Aestheticism through the character of poet Bunthorne.
W.S. Gilbert's liberetto has Bunthorne describe himself as:

A Japanese young man
A blue-and-white young man
Francesca di Rimini, niminy, piminy
Je-ne-sais-quoi young man!
A pallid and thin young man
A haggard and lank young man
A greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery
Foot-in-the-grave young man!

Sir Coutts Lindsay's Grosvenor Gallery was the visual centre of the Aesthetic movement, showing works by artists outside the Academy mainsteam, including Edward Burne-Jones, Walter Crane and James McNeill Whistler. The Gallery's namesake, Melbourne's Grosvenor Chambers (where Conder, Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Jane Sutherland and others had studios), was built for fashionable director Charles Stewart Paterson in 1887 - 88, in conscious tribute to the London Gallery.
5. Conder, letter to his cousin Margaret Conder, 11 February 1889, quoted in Ann Galbally, Charles Conder: The Last Bohemian, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2002.
6. See, for example A Shady Hollow by a Dusty Road, 1887, National Gallery of Victoria; An Early Taste for Literature, 1888, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery; A Holiday at Mentone,1888, Art Gallery of South Australia. Furled brollies appear in Coogee Bay, 1888, National Gallery of Victoria; Bronte Beach, 1888, National Gallery of Australia; and Rickett's Point, 1890.
7. Galbally, op. cit. (2002), p. 21
8. Streeton, letter to John Rothenstein, quoted in Rothenstein, The Life and Death of Conder, Dent, London, 1938, p. 25
9. Red and white and pink and white were particularly popular in the late 1880s. Similar women's summer dresses appear in countless magazine illustrations of the period, and in Conder's own A Holiday at Mentone, while Dr Mahoney sports pink and white stripes in John Peter Russell's portrait of 1887, and a similar shirt is worn by the main figure in Tom Roberts's Shearing the Rams, 1890, National Gallery of Victoria.
10. Galbally, op. cit. (2002), p. 22
11. 'The Art Society's Exhibition', Illustrated Sydney News, 27 September 1888, p. 25