International studio (81.1925)

inceRnAcionAL

tables of the beautiful ladies that he then and
always so deeply admired.

He was at length persuaded by his friends to
go into the country and paint and study as a
young artist should and especially to work from
living models. Every morning from the little inn
where he was staying with one or two of his artist
friends, he could be seen with his canvas and stool
following a little girl who Jed a calf—the artist
preceded by his models. But every evening he
would return in a state of irritation because the
calf would not stand still; and at length he swore
that he hated the calf so deeply that he was going
back to town. The incident proves his docility
and his respect for the advice of his friends, but
it taught him that he could never be an "art
student" in the accepted meaning of the phrase.

In 1890 he left Australia and went to Paris,
ostensibly working in the studio of Julian but
profiting little thereby because he could not adapt
himself to working regularly and steadily. He
met Will Rothenstein in Paris and they became
friends and fellow workers; but his friendship
with Toulouse-Lautrec and Anquetin were, in the
long run, far more influential upon his work.
After a summer in Normandy and a brief visit to
Algiers, Conder and Rothenstein held a joint
exhibition in Paris and on the strength of his con-
tributions thereto—he exhibited chiefly landscapes
—he was elected an associate member oi the
Beaux Arts. He was back in London in 1894 and
became a member of the New English Art Club,
organized as a protest against the Academicians.
He contributed to this club's exhibitions annually
for the rest of his life. In 1893 he first began his
experiments with fans. The first one was painted
in oil on a board; but he was so delighted with the
possibilities of the fan-shaped outline that he soon
began to paint them directly upon silk in water
color.

In 1901 he met and married a Mrs. Belford
and they settled in a little ivy-covered house in
Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where he lived until his
serious illness in 1907. In those six peaceful years
he worked hard and played with equal enthu-
siasm. He continued to paint landscapes in oil,
made water color drawings, pen and ink sketches,
drawings in red and black chalk, painted silk
panels and fans, made a number of lithographs
and even, in the lust for experiment, made one or
two not very good etchings. In the midst of this
"noble fury" of creative effort he and his wife
gave delightful parties, one of which was described
by a guest as a "not-to-be-forgotten fancy dress,
ball that was like a transcription of eighteenth-
century life." Summers were spent abroad, one

in Italy, another in Algiers with the return voyage
through Spain, and many in France. His health
began to fail in 1906 and though he did partially
recover for a time, he finally died in 1909 after a
long and painful illness.

Such was the life of our "decadent" of the
nineties: a great deal of hard work undertaken
solely for the love of experiment and creation;
many warm friends among the most interesting
personalities in an age full of them; a domestic
existence that was filled with perfect graciousness,
a perfect identity of tastes and a bountiful hos-
pitality; and a good business head that insured a
comfortable livelihood!

Conder's fame rests chiefly on his fan designs
and his paintings on silk; and there was and still
is some question in many minds if one who prac-
ticed chiefly the decorative arts is worthy of the
name of artist. It is unquestionably true that
some of his fans are masterpieces. One commen-
tator remarks—let us hope ironically—that the
proof of this lies in the fact that they have been
purchased by art museums in London, Paris and
New York. The very limitations of his mediums
—the silk upon which he applied his color and the
peculiar shape of the fan outline—seemed to
liberate his powers rather than to repress them.
In the regular mediums of canvas and oil, in land-
scape and portraiture, he was not nearly so suc-
cessful; he lost to a great extent the lightness of
touch that became unconscious when he worked
on silk, and his undeveloped sense of form and
design were more apparent.

When painting on silk, he worked directly;
he never made studies or sketches and always
depended upon his memory and his faculty of
accurate observation. He was most fastidious
about the quality and texture of the silks he used
and in his travels not only carried with him bolts
of various kinds of silk but spent much time in
hunting for new ones. The silk was either white
or of a creamy tone. He worked chiefly by arti-
ficial light. He loved to begin new designs, but
hated to finish the old ones. This feverishness
was due rather to the fecundity of his imagination
than to any real impatience; new themes, new
color combinations and new designs crowded his
fancy so that, in spite of a vast amount of work
accomplished, he never repeated himself. A few
of the fans were mounted, on plain mother-of-
pearl or ivory sticks, but the majority were
framed and exhibited simply as fan designs.

"L'Oiseau Bleu" is one of the most famous
of these. It is a silk panel painted in 1895, only
a year or two after he began his experiments with
fans. The principal figures in it—the man, the

APRIL 1925

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