ETHEL CARRICK FOX

Fine Australian and European Paintings, Sotheby's, Sydney, 16 August 1999, lot 4 (as 'French Market')

Possibly An exhibition of paintings by the late E. Phillips Fox and Ethel Carrick (Mrs. E. Phillips Fox), Cooling Galleries, London, 17 - 30 June 1938, cat. no. 30

This work has been lined and appears to have its original stretcher. There are several areas of stable crazing in impasto sections, especially to lower right hand corner and to left of woman in the white dress. Minor areas of retouching: to consolidate drying crack to trees (upper quarter) and areas of retouching to two women's headdress (far right hand edge and surrounding area), three small areas to cauliflowers and to left of cauliflower and at very bottom of nurses dress approximately 3cm in length. Minor flecks of retouching lower right and minor re-touching to left of woman in the right lower left hand corner. The frame is in good condition and is traditional in style.
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Trained in London at the Slade School, Ethel Carrick met her future husband Emanuel Phillips Fox when they were both at the plein-air painting colony in St Ives, Cornwall.  They married in 1905 and, settling in Paris, came increasingly under the influence of modern French painting, with its vibrant colours and lively brushwork.1

Amongst Carrick's several regular subjects, the open-air marketplace was a particular favourite.  Market scenes offered the artistic the luxuries of bright colours in the produce, impressionist high tone in the passages of sunlight and Manet black in the strong shadows under umbrellas and trees.  Busy, human, domestic places, they also provided an opportunity to include those snatches of human interest, of implied narrative, at which Carrick excelled.  Carrick's catalogues include references to markets for china, clay pots, vegetables, flowers, fish and even camels; markets in France and in Italy, in the country and in the desert; in Nice, Venice, Verona, Algiers, Morocco, Bou-Saad and even Darjeeling. 

The location of this particular French vegetable market is not known, though the avenues of slender trees and the pale gravel pathway are very like those in the Luxembourg Gardens, not far from the Foxes' Montparnasse studio apartment.  In any event, it is safely assumed to be a Parisian subject.  Carrick had left Australia after her husband's death in 1915, and after some months in England returned to Paris, where she was to remain for the duration of WWI and for some years afterwards.2 

Dated 1919, the present work may actually have been conceived as a celebration of peace, almost as an allegory.  A theophist and something of a feminist, Carrick was possessed of a strong social conscience.  She had worked tirelessly for the Red Cross in Sydney, and back in Paris helped gather support for prisoners of war and refugees, both during and after the conflict.  She was very well aware of the suffering of war's victims.  Her correspondence also records personal hardships: wartime shortages of coal and food, even the replacement of her pre-war flower garden with vegetable patch where she grew potatoes, beans and peas.3 

In contrast to these restrictions, and to her bleakly autumnal armistice sketch Luxembourg Gardens (1918, private collection), the present work is a sunny image of natural bounty - from floral hats to giant pumpkins, and of social harmony - between bourgeoisie, domestics, peasants and nuns.  Its very surface is joyous, recalling the remarks of a Melbourne reviewer a few years earlier: '... the seeming hasty and heavily laden swift passages of paint ... take form, gather, and make a delightful picture of the incident deftly caught and set down in a moment and yet conveying all that is wanted by the spectator.'4  It is nevertheless a fiction, however hopeful; a confection, a studio synthesis of separate studies.5 

When last offered at Sotheby's in August 1999, the present work set a record for the highest price paid for the work of an Australia woman artist.  Substantial exhibition pieces by Carrick such as Market, Under Trees, are very rare.  This sparkling, optimistic painting of Paris immediately after the war must be considered a work of very considerable art-historical and social-historical significance.

 

1. See Ruth Zubans, E. Philips Fox, His life and Art, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1995, p. 121 -2
2. See Ruth Zubans, 'A decade of travel in the life of Ethel Carrick Fox', Art and Australia, vol. 36, no. 1, 1997, pp. 88 - 95
3. Ethel Carrick Fox, letter to Ivy Brookes, 25 February 1919, quoted ibid p. 90
4. 'Mrs E. P. Fox's paintings.  Sane and Sound Impressionism.' The Argus, 11 July 1913, p. 5
The small oil sketch on panel (circa 1918, private collection) which was shown in the 1979 Geelong art gallery retrospective is clearly a preliminary study for the present work- the arrangement of the vegetables is essentially the same of the right foreground the present work.  See Margaret Rich (ed.), Ethel Carrick (Mrs E. Philips Fox): A retrospective exhibition, (exh cat.)