Souvenir of Seville

As famous for his watercolors on silk as he was for his self-destructive lifestyle, Charles Conder belonged to a generation that the poet W. B. Yeats called "the last Romantics." His delicately tinted watercolors seem like fragments of a lost era, conjuring an imaginary world of beauty, leisure, and luxury. This painted fan was made on a trip to Spain that Conder took with his wife, Stella Maris, to witness the celebration and pageantry of Holy Week and Easter. Its bold color and dynamic composition memorialized a period of health and happiness spent in the Mediterranean.