EMANUEL PHILLIPS FOX

Acquired from the artist by Lilla Reidy, Melbourne  
Thence by descent to the present owners; private collection, New South Wales

Good condition, superficial dirt. UV inspection confirms no retouching - original John Thallon frame
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Despite the persistent mythology of the '9 by 5' exhibition, and the recent art historians' designation of the work of Roberts, Streeton, Conder and Sutherland as 'Australian Impressionism'¹ , the Australian nationalist landscapes of the 1880s and 1890s were more influenced by international Naturalism and the Whistlerian sketch aesthetic than by the French Impressionists. It was only with the return of Emanuel Phillips Fox from Paris in 1891 that Monet's techniques of pure colour and optical mixing began to be applied to the Australian landscape.

The present work is exemplary of impressionism's focus on the immediate and the contingent. As Mary Eagle has observed, Fox's habitual method was 'to paint many sketches around a theme. Each act of painting was an immersion in nature, a study of colour and light for their own sakes, unimpeded by the calculated artistic economy of using each work as a step towards a major statement. Each study had its own rationale, its unique 'moment', light, colour, idea and form. They were independent creations; only in an oblique sense preparation for a big painting that might emerge from them' ²

In October 1898 Fox sent a number of just such 'big paintings' to the Victorian Artists' Society exhibition at the National Gallery, which left him free to devote himself to landscape over the spring and summer of 1898-99. Painting at Charterisville, often with 'summer school' students of his and Tudor St George Tucker's Melbourne School of Art, Fox produced numerous exquisite small landscapes, amongst them the present work. Ruth Zubans describes these 'studies of ephemeral effects' as including 'close-up views of a river with overhanging trees and similar scenes shifted further back (and) intimate views of sunlit thickets with gum saplings and European trees.'³   The present work is confidently dated to this summer campaign; it is of similar dimensions to Autumn tones (1899, private collection) or Green and gold (1899, private collection), and shares their free, pure paintwork.

Interestingly, Gum trees was acquired from the artist - possibly as a gift - by Lilla Reidy, a former student of the Melbourne School of Art who was Fox's assistant at Charterisville.

1.  See Terence Lane (ed.), Australian Impressionism (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2006
2.  Mary Eagle, The oil paintings of E. Phillips Fox in the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1997, p. 28
3.  Ruth Zubans, E. Phillips Fox: his life and art, Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 1995, p. 79