Ann Galbally - Charles Conder: The Last Bohemian

Ann Galbally

Charles Conder: The Last Bohemian

Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, paperback ed. 2003

xvii + 312 pp.               £19.50                         0 52285 084 7

Although Charles Conder is usually regarded as an Australian artist, he spent less than six years in the country. He arrived in Sydney at the age of 17 in 1884, the son of a first marriage dumped in the colonies by a parent who had fathered a second brood. Conder led a loose, fast life: when he could not pay his rent, his Darlinghurst landlady prevailed upon him to discharge his debt in bed. By the time he moved on to Melbourne and Heidelberg four years later, he had escaped from a dead-end job as a surveyor, trained himself to paint and caught syphilis. From 1890 he was to be found variously in France (mainly, of course, Paris), Scotland, Algeria and London’s Bloomsbury. He married a prosperous Canadian widow in 1901: his biographer assumes he had reached the tertiary stage of his illness and was no longer infectious, and we can only hope she is right. But syphilis destroyed him first as an artist, then as a personality and finally killed him in 1909. In this biography, which is both scholarly and humane, we meet Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts, and encounter Beardsley, Sickert, Toulouse-Lautrec and Oscar Wilde. The book is superbly illustrated, including nine colour prints of Conder’s work.