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.
