Charles Conder

Jacques-Emile Blanche
By descent to his grandson
Whitford and Hughes, London
Lance Crawford, Melbourne
Purchased from the above in 1984

(possibly) Leicester Galleries, London, December 1905 (as Portrait group)

John Rothenstein, The life and death of Conder, London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1938, p. 288

UV inspection confirms there has been no retouching. This work is on its original stretcher but appears to have been relined. There are minor scattered stable drying cracks throughout. The work is otherwise in good condition.
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While living in France in the mid-1890s, Charles Conder became a regular visitor to the fashionable resort town of Dieppe, where he met and befriended the painter Jacques-Emile Blanche. Blanche introduced him to the young and beautiful Olga, daughter of the Countess Caraciollo, and she, too, became a close friend. Some years later, both Blanche and Olga re-entered Conder's life in England. Blanche moved across the Channel to expand his social and professional horizons. He took a studio in London in 1904, and in that year he painted the portrait of Conder which now hangs in the Tate. Following the failure of her first marriage and her mother's death, Olga had also moved to England, where she remarried, and as the Baroness de Meyer became part of the glittering society set which revolved around her godfather, now crowned Edward VII.

According to John Rothenstein, who presumably had the details from Blanche himself, the figures in the present work include both Blanche and Olga de Meyer. The name 'Humphrey' inscribed on an earlier stretcher may also indicate that one of the female figures is another of Conder's friends (and the aunt of his wife Stella), the artist Mrs Florence Humphrey.

However, the significance of the present work is considerably greater than the sum of its sitters. Ann Galbally has written that around this time 'Conder, wanting to work more in oil and en plein air, began a series of modern-day fêtes galantes or open air "conversation pieces." He grouped his willing sitters ... walking or sitting and at times playing croquet. These are modern, subjectless pictures which the viewer is invited to enjoy solely for the qualities of colour and form.'¹  Landscape with figures, possibly a view of the Sussex Downs behind Brighton (where Conder painted in 1903-1904), is just such a confection, an updated, Edwardian Watteau in which the courtiers' pink knee-breeches are replaced by tweed plus-fours and the ladies wear pink muslin teagowns rather than farthingale skirts.

The work epitomises Conder's understanding and mastery of the subtle, fleeting shifts of psychology and meteorology. The modernist critic Roger Fry was warmly appreciative; reviewing Conder's October 1904 exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, he wrote: 'It is the boast of some laborious naturalists that in their work you can tell the precise time of day at which they painted their records of observed facts. Well, in Mr Conder's work, wildly improbable though it is, and innocent of anything like "correct values", this is accomplished, and, much more, it is not only the time of day that we have, but the mood it evokes.'²

1.    Ann Galbally, Charles Conder: the last bohemian, Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2002, pp. 242-243
2.  Roger Fry, quoted ibid., p. 248