Rickett's Point

Charles Conder’s Australian pictures, including his great images of leisure and sunlight, such as this work have assumed iconic status in the popular imagination. His Australian pictures were, however, all produced before he reached the age of twenty-two and, in sequence or individually, certainly show him learning and refining his craft in the lively artistic circles in which he moved in Sydney and Melbourne in the late 1880s.

The documentation of a picture such as this, looked at together with infra-red evidence and a technical analysis, shows how quickly he was moving at the end of his time in Australia. The painting was originally of conventional landscape shape, but after the initial plein air session on the beach at Rickett’s Point, the canvas was drastically cut at the top and bottom, acquiring its present, elongated, Japanesque shape. In the short time between making a thumbnail sketch of the picture for the catalogue of the Victorian Artists’ Society winter exhibition, and the opening of the exhibition on 29 March, 1890, Conder also repainted large areas of the surface, adding important elements such as the pole on the left, the girl in the blue dress in the centre and the dark bush on the right.

The picture shows Conder skilfully grappling with the artistic challenge he set himself, namely of softening a sharply bisected composition made up of triangles whose apexes all meet at a point beneath the centre right of the picture. Tension is created between that point and the true centre of the picture, the figures of the seated mother and child. A teasing, ‘false’ vanishing point is provided by the scarlet parasol on the horizon. The brushwork and colour harmonies and contrasts in the picture demonstrate the great strides Conder had made as a technician and colourist since the late 1880s.
Text © National Gallery of Victoria, Australia.