In 1895 Max Beerbohm, caricaturist, humourist and fin-de-siècle character, met the painter Charles Conder for the first time. Conder was then 27, flitting between London and Paris as part of a coterie that included Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and just beginning to make a reputation as an artist. What struck Beerbohm, however, was that he didn’t encounter someone vibrant with the expectation of unfolding possibilities but “a sick man, immersed in dreams, unable to look realities in the face”.
Conder (1868-1909) was indeed a doomed man, suffering from rheumatism, gout, insomnia and the effects of syphilis and absinthe. He had hard-living under his belt and plenty more to come. Dissipation came easily to him and he had reasons for averting his gaze from reality. Conder personified the louche aestheticism of the “Yellow Nineties”, execrating “society rubbish” with its “at homes – dinners or conversaziones or dancing” but stirring instead to café life and “the jabber of my friends, the click of the billiard balls, the smell of heliotrope”.
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