Rickett's Point
1890
- Artist/s name
- Charles CONDER
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Measurements
- 31.0 x 77.2 cm
- Place/s of Execution
- Beaumaris, Victoria
- Accession Number
- 2909-4
- Credit Line
- National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1951
- Gallery Location
- Gallery 6
Level 2, NGV Australia
Contemporary critics considered Rickett's Point 'noticeable for clever summer colouring' and 'full of varied colour and clever effects’, but they felt it was too slight for public exhibition as a 'finished' picture – simply a stretch of bayside beach midway between Sandringham and Mordialloc.
The painting is much less formally structured than his work A Holiday at Mentone, (Art Gallery of South Australia) but its apparent spontaneity is carefully balanced by Conder's decorative instinct. The long narrow canvas is divided horizontally – half sea, half sky – by a bold brilliant stripe of blue horizon, and diagonally by the foreground waterline and the treetops dissolved in a shimmer of light.
The image is a vignette of happy idleness from the artist's last Australian summer. On 17 April 1890, the Victorian Artists' Society gave Conder and George Walton a grand farewell dinner at Legal's French restaurant in Spring Street: about ten days later Conder departed for Europe.
