Ethel Carrick was one of the great travel artists of the twentieth century. Over the years she travelled through Europe as well as to North Africa and India – all important sites for her art. During the years of her marriage to Emanuel Phillips Fox from 1905 until 1915 when he died unexpectedly of cancer, the couple travelled widely, including to various places in North Africa where Carrick would return later in her career. Since the late nineteenth century, North Africa and the Middle East had been favoured by many artists from around the world. Australian artist Hilda Rix Nicholas went to Morocco a year after Carrick’s initial visit, having seen her North African paintings in her Paris apartment. Like Nicholas, and in contrast with some of the male artists who painted Orientalist views, Carrick tended not to exoticise her subject matter but rather painted what she observed in front of her, including market scenes and people going about their daily lives.
Laveuses Algeriennes is a painting of Algerian women washing clothes in a stream that palpitates with a sense of light, heat and vibrant colour. In this work she deftly combines close observation of the women going about their daily chores on the banks of a stream, with highly expressive brushmarks, to convey luminosity on the rocks and in the rippling water. What makes this work remarkable is its high degree of abstraction at a time when abstract art by artists like Wassily Kandinsky were only just coming to the fore. Like Kandinsky, with whom she exhibited, she was keenly interested in the correlations of music and painting to express the inner life of the spirit. This was a ground-breaking painting for its time and it remains a revelatory work in Carrick’s artistic career.
