He left school at 15, and his very religious, non-artistic father, against Charles's natural artistic inclinations, decided that he should follow in his footsteps as a civil engineer.

[1][4] Regarded as perhaps his greatest Sydney painting, Departure of the Orient – Circular Quay (1888)[5] was the culmination of Conder's new mastery of form and brushwork.

A dockside scene, it depicts the bustling harbour and ferry berths at Circular Quay in Sydney Cove at the moment when the Orient has cast off for her voyage to England.

The trio shared studios and frequently painted together en plein air at artists' camps in rural localities around Melbourne, first at Box Hill and, from late 1888, in Heidelberg.

In August 1889, Conder, Streeton, Roberts, Frederick McCubbin and Charles Douglas Richardson staged the 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition in Melbourne, establishing themselves as exponents of an Australian variant of impressionism.

Short of cash, the attractive Conder apparently paid off his landlady by sexual means, catching syphilis in the process, which was to plague the later years of his life.

Like Conder, Nerli was a bon-vivant whose appreciation of the 'dam fine' 'Melbourne girls' survives in a letter to a mutual friend, Percy Spence.

In March 1890, in the lead up to the Victorian Artists' Society's Winter exhibition, the trio staged a show at their Gordon Chambers studio, featuring Heidelberg and "up country" landscapes.

He moved to Paris and studied at the Académie Julian,[7] where he befriended several avant-garde artists, including Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who painted his portrait and featured him in at least two of his Moulin Rouge works.

He married a wealthy widow, Stella Maris Belford (née MacAdams) at The British Embassy Paris on 5 December 1901, giving him financial security.

Satirist Barry Humphries was a major aficionado and collector of the artist, and at one time had the world's largest private collection of Conder's work.