Charles Conder: His Life and Works (First Edition)

The standard early monograph on the Heidelberg School painter Charles Conder, with Campbell Dodgson’s catalogue of his lithographs and etchings, and still the source cited in the literature of his paintings.

Charles Edward Conder (1868–1909) was an English-born painter, lithographer and designer who emigrated to Australia in 1884. In Sydney he worked as an illustrator for the Illustrated Sydney News and in 1888 painted Departure of the Orient, Circular Quay, bought that year by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He moved that October to Melbourne, where with Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton he painted at the artists’ camps at Box Hill and Heidelberg, and he is counted among the core members of the Heidelberg School. He left Australia in 1890 and spent the rest of his life in Europe. He died at Virginia Water, Surrey, in February 1909, aged forty.

Frank Gibson’s study appeared five years after Conder’s death, and he had already written the artist’s entry in the 1912 supplement of the Dictionary of National Biography. It remains the principal early account of the life and work, and later catalogues of Conder’s paintings cite it by page, among them Sotheby’s and Menzies.

First edition. Large quarto. 118pp. Frontispiece portrait and 121 illustrations, among them lithographic plates in colour [please confirm the count and the number in colour]. Original cream buckram, decorated on the cover with a floral design and stamped in gilt and colour to the cover and spine, with the title and spine lettering in gilt. Upper edge gilt. Good. The boards are in good condition, with mild soiling to the cloth along the spine and lower edge and some foxing to the covers. The contents are in good condition, with age toning to the endpapers and foxing and age toning throughout the text block. The upper edge remains bright, and the lithographic plates are in excellent condition, their colours bright and relatively free of markings and age toning.

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Catalogue Number: HH000057