Conder's move to Australia as a teenager put him at the centre of the country's most significant painting movement of the period almost by accident of timing. He showed at the 9 x 5 Exhibition in Melbourne in 1889, a show organised by artists including Tom Roberts and named for the small cigar-box panel size many of the works used, which is generally treated as the public debut of Australian plein air Impressionism and the loosely defined Heidelberg School associated with it^[1]. Conder's paintings from this period, of which A holiday at Mentone is one, share that circle's interest in painting everyday leisure and local landscape directly and rapidly, in a lighter palette than the more academic Australian landscape tradition that preceded it. He left for Paris in 1890, only a year or so after the 9 x 5 show, which makes his Australian output a comparatively brief but formative chapter rather than the centre of his career.

In Paris, Conder enrolled at the Academie Julian and quickly built friendships with Louis Anquetin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and William Rothenstein, sharing an exhibition with Rothenstein in 1891 and becoming a member of the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts by 1893^[1]. His mature style moved away from the direct plein air Impressionism of his Australian years toward a flatter, more decorative treatment of landscape, an approach he credited most directly to Whistler and Puvis de Chavannes rather than to Monet, even though he had studied Monet's work closely, including seeing his Haystacks at the dealer Durand-Ruel's in 1891^[1]. By the mid-1890s he had largely moved from oil to watercolour on silk, designing decorative screens and developing the delicate, evocative eighteenth-century-inflected themes that English critics such as D. S. MacColl championed through the rest of the decade^[1].