Born in England, Charles Conder spent a significant part of his career in Australia, where he became integral to the Heidelberg School of Australian art, becoming friends with notable figures like Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts, and sharing a studio with the latter.

Conder spent the latter part of his career in Europe, where he lived mostliy in England, but moved in Paris circles with artists like Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, and painted in the countryside around Dieppe, where he became friends with Norwegian landscape painter Frits Thaulow.

If you look through images of Conder’s work on the web, you’ll find a lot of his more decorative work, with silk paintings and decorative fans, featuring stylized figures and what appear to be theatrical settings. I have to say I’m not fond of these, but his landscapes, by contrast, can be quite wonderful.

I’ve obviously featured examples of his work that I like here.

When I first highlighted Victorian painter Edmund Blair Leighton back in 2006, resources for images of his paintings on the web were pretty thin. Since then, some new images sources have made it much more rewarding to view his work.

Leighton’s two main themes were of romanticized medieval subjects — knights in armor, chivalry, elegant royal ladies and their attendant environments — and contemporary Victorian subjects of courtship, marriage and romantic intrigue.

Leighton’s paintings almost always had a narrative element, a story either overt or implied, and he rendered them with a combination of exacting draftsmanship and muted atmospheric color punctuated with higher chroma passages.

(Edmund Blair Leighton should be distinguished from Frederick Lord Leighton, no relation, also a Victorian painter I’ve featured previously.)

Merry-Joseph Blondel was a French Neoclassical painter active in the early part of the 19th century.

He studied with the well known painter Jean-Baptiste Regnault, and from fairly early in his career formed a lasting friendship with Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.

Blondel had a tremendously successful career, garnering numerous awards and prestigious commissions, including major works for the Palace of Versailles, the palace of Fontainebleau, the Louvre Museum and the Luxembourg Palace.

His refined, exacting style varied from naturalistic to classicaly styled.

Among reproductions of his works on Wikimedia Commons, you will find a number of greyscale images (images above, second and third from bottom). These are of large scale (6 foot high [190 cm] or larger) commercially hand-printed “wallpapers” produced by Dafour, Paris, and designed by Blondel and Louis Lafitte. The figures in these have a fascinatingly sculptural quality to them. (More info on Sotheby’s, and here.)