Charles Conder

Book excerpt: Charles Conder was one of the youngest, most original and most talented members of the Heidelberg School of impressionist painters, and one of the few to achieve a lasting reputation outside Australia. His work hangs in many major collections, including the Tate Britain, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Conder painted the Hawkesbury region and Sydney's beaches, including Coogee with Tom Roberts-who invited him to Melbourne. There he joined the artists' camps at Box Hill and Heidelberg, painted urban and bayside scenes and was a major instigator of the famous '9 x 5' Exhibition in 1889. As in Sydney, his carefree charm and delicate, witty paintings endeared him to literary and artistic circles. Paris beckoned early, and he soon fell in with the fin de si cle generation led by Oscar Wilde, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Aubrey Beardsley. He embraced Bohemia, was forever in debt, worked erratically but unceasingly and lived as if there were no tomorrow. Although Conder was rescued from poverty by marriage to a wealthy Canadian widow, his bohemian past eventually called in its account. Tragically, he descended into syphilitic madness and died in his fortieth year. Conder's was a beguiling, charmed, desperate life. He was handsome and rakish and sociable-sensitive to people and place, and extraordinarily talented. Yet his work has been long neglected. If he was waiting for the right biographer, Conder's patience has been vindicated. Ann Galbally investigates her subject with scholarly rigour, but writes with lightness of touch and with passion, sharing her fascination with the people and places Conder knew. This is a splendid biography of a gifted artist whose personal style and unconventional life will appeal to another fin de siecle generation of readers.