Charles Edward Conder (24 October 1868 – 9 February 1909) was an English-born painter, lithographer and designer. He emigrated to Australia and was a key figure in the Heidelberg School, arguably the beginning of a distinctively Australian tradition in Western art.

Conder was born in Tottenham, Middlesex, the second son, of six children, of James Conder, civil engineer and Mary Ann Ayres. He spent several years as a young child in India until the death of his mother (aged 31 years) on 14 May 1873 in Bombay, when Charles was four; he was then sent back to England and attended a number of schools including a boarding school at Eastbourne, which he attended from 1877. 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.

In 1884, at the age of 16, he was sent to Sydney, Australia, where he worked for his uncle, a land surveyor for the New South Wales government. However he disliked the work, much preferring to draw the landscape rather than survey it. In 1886, he left the job and became an artist for the Illustrated Sydney News, where he was in the company of other artists such as Albert Henry Fullwood, Frank Mahony and Benjamin Edwin Minns. He also joined the Art Society of New South Wales, attended the painting classes of Alfred James Daplyn, and went on plein air painting excursions with Julian Ashton.

Regarded as perhaps his greatest Sydney painting, Departure of the Orient – Circular Quay (1888) 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. It was quickly purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, making it the first of Conder's works to enter a public collection.

In Sydney in 1888, Conder met and painted with plein airist Tom Roberts, then visiting from Melbourne. Later that year, Conder moved to Melbourne to join Roberts and his circle of friends, including painter Arthur Streeton. 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. They came to be regarded as the core members of the Heidelberg School movement.

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. Conder contributed 46 "impressions" to the show and designed the Symbolist and Art Nouveau-inspired catalogue.

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. During his two years in Melbourne, Conder produced a number of famous Heidelberg School works, including Under The Southern Sun. This painting clearly shows the burning sunlight and desolation that can be inflicted by an Australian drought. While other Heidelberg School artists, born and raised in Australia, imbued many of their works with nationalist sentiments, Conder, a believer in the credo of art for art's sake, instead tended to focus on everyday scenes and the pursuit of leisure.

In Melbourne, Conder rekindled his association with G. P. Nerli, an itinerant Italian painter and the bearer of new European influences who has been credited with shaping Conder's development. The extent of the influence has been debated, but the fact of it is undeniable. 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.