Elder Wing of Australian Art: Self-Guided Audio Tour
Work 9 of 15

Charles Conder was an irrepressible talent who might never have become an artist. In 1884, when he was aged fifteen, his deeply religious father sent him to Australia from his native London to become a surveyor. The teenaged Conder was apprenticed to his uncle, but two years in country survey camps only heightened his appreciation of the Australian landscape. When he resumed his art studies in Sydney in 1886, he won a prize for the best painting from nature and, with it, his uncle’s blessing to pursue a career as an artist.

Conder soon met and painted alongside leading Australian Impressionist Tom Roberts, who encouraged him to paint outdoors and to observe the atmospheric qualities of colour, light and space. Within weeks of his arrival in Melbourne in late 1888, Conder painted this masterpiece of Australian Impressionism, A holiday at Mentone. He had only just turned twenty.

With a light more dazzling than any previous Australian painting, A holiday at Mentone celebrates the bleaching brilliance of noonday at a beach near Melbourne. Its mood of middle-class leisure, however, contrasts with the formality of Conder’s structured composition of verticals and horizontals – in the jetty, its shadows and the figures above and below it. The leisured atmosphere also disguises the shifting social landscape that Conder observes, seen in the presence of the progressive ‘new woman’ in the foreground and the scene of social interaction at a time when the sexes were forbidden to mingle outside Mentone’s sea-baths.

A holiday at Mentone marked the beginning of an immensely productive but short period for Conder as a critical figure among the Australian Impressionists, a period in which he created a legacy of lyrical landscapes. Eighteen months later, however, Conder left Australia, never to return. In Europe his career flourished, but again too briefly. He died at age forty.