The poetry of the world

The National Gallery will hold a retrospective of the art of Ethel Carrick (also known as Carrick Fox or Phillips Fox) for the first time since 1979.¹ While Carrick and her husband Emanuel Phillips Fox were generally mutually supportive, her reputation has been largely overshadowed by his success. Bearing in mind that they were only married for ten years between 1905 and 1915 due to his unexpected, untimely death, and that she continued working until 1952, this will be a timely opportunity to consider her artistic contribution in a fresh light.

Carrick’s life and art can largely be characterised by her passion for travel. While her country of origin was the United Kingdom, for most of her adult life her home fluctuated between France and Australia. Her main base from 1905 onwards was an apartment at 65 Boulevard Arago, in the artistic enclave of the Cité Fleurie in Montparnasse, Paris. This complex of dwellings formed a community which Carrick described as ‘quite a cosmopolitan little colony of hard-working artists who have apartments … thirty different nationalities being represented’.² These artists originated from many parts of Europe as well as from America and Russia. They came like homing pigeons in search of a new life in the city of light; to find and reshape themselves in a place of great art museums and diverse possibilities, personally and professionally.

Born in Uxbridge, a suburban town in west London, Carrick studied at the Slade School of Fine Art. It was during her time at the Slade that she began to travel to further her artistic development: going on painting excursions to Cornwall (initially in 1899), staying at St Ives with her women artist friends and also spending time at Newlyn to concentrate on painting en plein air. Carrick met her future husband the Australian artist Emanuel Phillips Fox in St Ives, initially in 1901, and the two were married on 9 May 1905 at St Peter’s Church in Ealing, London. Soon after, they set up their home in Paris and in the ensuing years they travelled widely in Europe.

They visited Venice in spring 1907, staying into early summer. Carrick later wrote: ‘In 1907, after despatching pictures to London (Royal Academy) & also to the Paris Salon [we] went down to Venice & worked there for a couple of months.’³ While there Carrick and Fox sometimes painted the same subject side by side. Carrick’s St Marks Venice 1907 reveals her passion for architecture and the movement of people bathed in light and shadow. Given the small scale of this work and relatively loose brushwork, it is remarkable that she manages to suggest so much detail in the multi-domed basilica, down to a sense of the glowing mosaics in the alcoves of the facade, as well as the fashions of the people in the square. Structures anchor us, remaining like leitmotifs across time, while fashions take us back to a particular period. Light and shadow speak of the transience.

In October 1907 Carrick showed paintings of Venice in the Salon d’Automne (the progressive alternative to the Paris Salon) and the following year, Venetian subjects were shown by her and Fox in Australia. One of the most telling aspects of the reviews were comments on how radically different some of Fox’s small paintings appeared in contrast to his earlier works. Fox, who had already established his reputation in Melbourne for his work undertaken in Australia and Europe, was known for paintings that combined academic realism with a homage to the dappled light of Impressionism. While Carrick was inspired to an extent by his art, her own expressive, post-impressionist approach also clearly exerted an impact on his painting — particularly those on small experimental canvases undertaken on their travels. ‘The paint application of even the broadest sketches [by Fox] of the 1890s had not dominated space and atmosphere to the extent that was reported in 1908.’⁴ During Carrick’s first of many visits to Australia that year, her small exhibition at Bernard’s Gallery in Melbourne was well reviewed in Art and Architecture:

Prior to her visit to Australia Carrick’s distinctive talent had emerged in her expressive small paintings of groups of people in settings like the Luxembourg Gardens. In Australia she painted local subjects including Esquisse en Australie (Sketch in Australia) 1908 in the Sydney Botanic gardens. Here the bold brushwork and overall vitality of the scene where children play and adults converse on a sunny day would have appeared distinctly modern to local audiences. The vibrant apple-green of the sunlit grass and deep shadows are reminiscent of Georges Seurat’s famous A Sunday afternoon on La Grande Jatte 1884, of people relaxing in a park just south of Paris. It is likely Carrick would have seen this painting in Seurat’s retrospective at the Société des Artistes Indépendants in Paris in 1905. While the vigour of Carrick’s paint handling is quite contrary to the precise painterly notations of Seurat, the subject and high-key palette are in harmony. Carrick’s impactful Esquisse en Australie, recently acquired by the National Gallery, is one of the first post-impressionist works by a woman artist to be painted and exhibited in Australia, enabling us to retell the stories of Australian art. She took it back to Paris with her where it was exhibited at the Salon d’Automne at the start of November 1908, demonstrating how travel across continents occurred not only by people but also by the works of art.

Carrick and Fox were inveterate travellers during their ten-year marriage. Among their numerous adventures in search of what Fox described as the search for ‘some settled sunlight’ and fresh inspiration was the time they spent in North Africa, following in the footsteps of French artists like Eugène Delacroix. In 1911 Fox wrote to Hans Heysen:

Carrick’s interest in the local people shone through in different contexts, including in markets and street scenes, with buildings often providing key reference points for the hustle and bustle of daily life. In A market in Kairouan c 1911, people appear to be moving down towards the viewer from the arched structure in the background. Unlike the detailed more academic approach to portraiture and place of Carrick and Fox’s friend Hilda Rix Nicholas, who also painted in Morocco, what Carrick brought to the subject was an impression of the scene: she wanted enough but not too much. She aimed to distil the essence of her close observations beyond literal depiction, imbuing her works with feeling and the constant flow of energy and life. In the market scene she depicts people going about their business; the creamy colours of the buildings set off by bright touches of colour. Carrick’s remarkable painting Mosque in Tangier 1911 reveals her diverse capacities as a colourist, this time applying the most subtle, delicate hues to give substance and atmosphere to the old town bathed in light. Figures swathed in their robes are unified with place. The structure of the building with a small green doorway holds the composition which shimmers with a sense of spiritual presence.

In July 1913 Carrick held an exhibition at Melbourne’s Guild Hall on Swanston Street, including works undertaken during her travels to areas in France, North Africa and Spain. By this point she had become interested in theosophical beliefs, in particular ideas around the unity of all humanity, encompassing diverse belief systems. It is likely that these ideas were in discussion during her early years in Montparnasse, flowing on to her first visit to Australia in 1908 which serendipitously coincided with a lecture tour by one of the leaders of the Theosophical Society, Annie Besant. The passing of Emanuel Phillips Fox left Carrick grief-stricken. Her interest in Theosophy and Spiritualism increased during the war years, along with many artists internationally, especially women. One of her sisters Jessie, who lost two sons as a result of the First World War (one died during the conflict and the other after the war), published The witness (1918) to convey communications with her beloved offspring in the wake of their passing.

Carrick had experienced family difficulties before Fox died (partly as a result of her not having had children) and after she left Australia in 1916 she did not return for nearly ten years. In 1925 she came with the express purpose of promoting Fox’s art. During this time she visited The Manor, the headquarters of the Theosophical Society in Sydney, attending the theosophical convention in April of the same year.

Back in France in 1926 Carrick’s paintings showed a renewed strength of purpose, especially those undertaken on her travels to Nice where she was delighted by the renowned flower markets. She painted many variations: sometimes taking a wide view of market stalls and groups of people, at others homing in on close-ups of floral bunches crisply wrapped to form striking shapes. In her painting, In the Nice flower market c 1926, bright bunches of flowers are captured on tables and amassed in baskets under stylish umbrellas. In the foreground, a seller dressed in black engages with a woman about a prospective purchase. Beyond, differently attired figures — including a couple of nuns — cluster with illuminated buildings in the far distance. The colonnade of arches on the right help to locate the scene while also providing gently curving counterparts to the angularity of the tilting canopies of umbrellas which animate the scene under the leafy trees. Here nature and culture are united in harmony.

The idea of harmony across cultures was an integral part of Carrick’s travel stories and of her broadly theosophical aspirations. She was extremely active in fundraising for the war effort during the First and Second World Wars in France and Australia. She also travelled to India, to Adyar, the headquarters of the Theosophical Society in Madras (now Chennai). In June 1939, prior to the outbreak of war, she was spending time on a houseboat in Kashmir, an experience she found idyllic and inspiring; ‘a paradise for painters’.⁷ In interviews, Carrick remarked that she was assisted by local Indian people in moving to different locations along the river, an experience combining work with pleasure over months ‘capturing India’s beauty on canvas’.⁸ In Paysage d’Inde-le-bac c 1939, Carrick depicts groups of locals variously embarking on a boat and floating down the river. As always, close observation informs the painting, with a variety of buildings providing anchor points on the journey. Almost half of the composition is taken up with the lapping water, conveyed by brisk, broad strokes of the brush which also capture the varied reflections. The figures are evocatively depicted; the colours and shapes adding to a sense of unity. It is a painting about contemplation and states of being.

As we reflect upon this dream-like floating world in the context of Carrick’s broader output, we come to the realisation that across the continents and localities which inspired her as a travel artist, the importance of her works resides in her embrace of being open to many possibilities — to diversity not disharmony — a central tenet of Krishnamurti’s teachings.⁹ In each location in which she worked, whether in Europe, Australia, Africa or India, specific differences are clearly observed and articulated. At the same time there is a feeling that, ultimately, we are all human beings making our way in the world, united in the flow of luminosity and shadow, of energies and presences, that inform our inner selves and the world around us.

Ethel Carrick is on display from the 30 November 2024 to 27 April 2025.

This story was first published in The Annual 2023.