Further silks

Despite their relatively poor state of preservation, the Garvan silks stand out as Charles Conder’s masterpiece. No other decorative project was as monumental in scale, or as complex in its various superimposed registers of imaginative detail or richness of coloring. I am not quite sure how Conder primed his thin silk support so as to prevent the watercolors from bleeding into the warp and weft strands—perhaps some sort of starch or size. Yet faced with such comparatively enormous areas to cover, Conder’s achievement here, using tiny brushes to apply his watercolors, and in various degrees of fine drawing, must have been as daunting as that of il Baciccio when faced with the task of applying an illusionistic fresco to the vaulted nave in the church of the Gesù. I suppose it is hardly surprising that, following his punishment by the critics, Conder never again attempted something as remotely ambitious, and it is probably true that working on a more intimate scale suited his soft temperament far better. We are creating three false walls in which to mount the nine silks, in groups of three, together with something that approximates the original “Louis-Philippe” molded surrounds in white with touches of gold—not too much—which leaves only the selection of a wall color. The logical choice would be the palest of lemon yellows, a color that exerted tremendous fascination in Paris and London through the 1890s, but that may not work owing to the natural discoloration of the silks. Perhaps a pale, very pale and powdery blue. We shall do some experiments, and see what we come up with.

The silks again

 

Here is the other, best-preserved of Conder’s cartouches for the nine Garvan silks here at Yale—in many respects the strangest and most uncharacteristic, owing to its semi-martial, semi-heraldic prompts. Newcomers are inclined to judge Conder’s draftsmanship harshly, and may also from time to time regard his visions as slight. However, neither charge in any way diminishes the fertility of the artist’s imagination, the inventiveness of his designs, or the vividness of his dreams of powerful women—in this case some sort of fusion of Boadicea, Lady Godiva, or Jeanne d’Arc, indeed wearing armor and passing in procession through a triumphal arch festooned and framed with forget-me-nots, her mount preceded by a female companion walking beside beds of red roses in the foreground. The surmounting armorial crest of breastplate, gorget, and helmet with a crest of three frothing white ostrich feathers reinforces the military character of the asymmetrical cartouche beneath—and stands in strong contrast to the pastoral shepherdesses’ crooks and the many other floral and botanical motifs that flank certain of the other, lesser cartouches on neighboring panels. (Note those black gloves, which were the height of fashion in 1895.)  

Conder’s treatment of his notional skies also nods generously to conventions of Japanese silk-painting, and to a lesser extent, Japenese woodblock prints, something that Camille Pissarro noticed and commented on in 1895, although the older artist was curiously insensitive to, even unaware of, the artist’s fundamentally eighteenth-century framework.

Yet even the small medallions (such as this) that hover in pairs above and below the principal cartouches reward close inspection. Through that busy year of 1895 Charles Conder was obviously borne aloft on a cloud of creative excitement, and rarely if ever did his watercolor palette attain such heights of vividness and flamboyance. In a way, these are the exceptions that prove the rule laid down much later by W. B. Yeats, who, after witnessing the first performance in December 1896 of Alfred Jarry’s anti-realist satire Ubu Roi at the Théâtre de l’oeuvre in Paris (with sets designed by Paul Sérusier and Pierre Bonnard) recorded his own remarkable and characteristically immodest assessment of Conder’s central importance to the international literary and art worlds of the mid-1890s, an assessment that was evidently carried with him by the artist into the heart of Edwardian London, and happily shared there by those few enlightened connoisseurs who loved and supported him for the rest of his painfully short life: “After Stéphane Mallarmé, after Paul Verlaine, after Gustave Moreau, after Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after all our subtle color and nervous rhythm, after the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is possible? After us the Savage God.”

The silks

One of the most exciting aspects of our exhibition Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (which opens here at the Yale Center for British Art on February 28 next) is the opportunity this affords to exhibit for the first time in more than a century the suite of nine silk panels that were decorated in 1895 by Charles Conder for a small boudoir in the eighteenth-century style in La Maison de l’art nouveau de Samuel Bing. The eight slender silk panels, and the much larger ninth panel that they flank have recently been repaired and conserved by our colleagues in the department of Asian art conservation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. They were a vast amplification of Conder’s approach to delicate fan decorations. Like those, he painted his silks in watercolor. Conder’s most ambitious decorative project, far more ambitious than any of his subsequent silks, is composed of medallions, vignettes, and cartouches linked by fluttering ribbons, swags, and other airy motifs, in which are set pastoral and decorative scenes, essentially without any specific subject, but more generally alluding to assignations, scenarios, and ambiguous encounters—in bed chambers, beside urns on parapets, in groves and bowers. They were intended to complement new furniture in the style of Louis XVI, and Bing was especially proud that all of his rooms, Conder’s included, were to be lit with electric lights. Conder’s decorations form a kind of dream world, embedded in the eighteenth century, but occasionally referring indirectly to the doomed characters in Balzac’s series of novels La Comédie humaine, by which Conder was fascinated, and also the curious mischief-making of various characters borrowed from the commedia dell’arte. Feminine love, and a keen interest in Lesbian situations both mesmerized Conder, and often informed his choices of motif and the underlying basis of his figure compositions, together with sinister men who watch and scheme, as in this case. Lately the question has arisen as to what if any specific subject may be identified here; but we in the tight-knit international community of Conder-istas insist that the artist’s iconography was determinedly non-specific, and formed a powerfully erotic, opium- and absinthe-induced dream of strong women such as this décolleté lady who toys with the contents of her jewel box, urged on by the sinister, gesturing figure of Pantalone in red, who probably stands for the general notion of greed, or the pairs of watchful lovers at either side of the broad parapet in the different register above—all suffused with the fragrance drifting from baskets or garlands of flowers, or warm breezes that disturb the dandelion, the bed canopy, the gauze curtain, the butterfly’s wing, or ruffle the peacock feather, or make the candles smoke. These are some of the elements of Conder’s vision, always melancholy, and usually executed so as to make his silks look old. Such is also the opinion of my excellent colleague Stephen Coppel in the department of prints and drawings at the British Museum, whom I visited last week to discuss these very questions, and we are in total agreement. Towards the end of his life Conder marked with rose petals his favorite passages in Claude Phillips’s monograph about Antoine Watteau, and that same vague, indolent, but richly evocative sensibility is what filled his suite of silks for Bing. Quite obviously nobody in Paris then had the faintest idea of what Conder was up to, except for a small group of the mostly English friends who loved him, as do those of us who have been fortunate enough to stray into his mind world—the late and much lamented Ursula Hoff, Ann Galbally, Barry Pearce, Stephen Coppel, and certainly the collector Barry Humphries, who knows as much as anyone about Charles Conder, and probably more than most. The nagging problem for we Australians, and for Conder himself, is that the artist has yet to find his proper place in the recognized pantheon of Edwardian artists at either side of the Atlantic. In that respect I have high hopes for this part of the exhibition. For Conder—born in Tottenham, raised in India, trained in Sydney and Melbourne, lured to Paris (where he was befriended by Toulouse-Lautrec), and in due course re-adopted by England, then rescued in 1901 and nursed thereafter until his death in 1909 by the wealthy widow and erotomaniac Stella Maris Belford—the opportunity to exhibit a large body of work in La Maison de l’art nouveau alongside such a distinguished group of colleagues including Maurice Denis, Paul Ranson, Édouard Vuillard, Henry van der Velde, Albert Besnard, and Frank Brangwyn (among others) ought to have made Conder’s reputation in France, but instead he was singled out and viciously mauled by a number of more than usually bigoted Parisian critics. At length his silks proved impossible to sell. Much later, through the kindly influence of Hugh Lane, Conder’s suite passed into the collection of the American collector John Quinn, who at first intended to install them in a room in his New York townhouse, but sold them instead in 1917 to Mr. and Mrs. Francis P. Garvan. By this roundabout route Mr. Garvan eventually presented them to the Yale University Art Gallery as part of his immense gift of about 10,000 objects of mostly American decorative arts, to mark the Garvans’ twentieth wedding anniversary. And here Conder’s silks have remained ever since, awaiting rediscovery.