Ethel Carrick Fox

Private collection, Geneva

Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux Arts (The New Salon), Paris 1912, cat. 268
Paintings by Mrs E. Phillips Fox (Miss Ethel Carrick), The Guildhall, Melbourne, 11 - 26 July 1913, cat. 6 (as 'High tide at St. Malô')
Paintings by Mrs E. Phillips Fox (Miss Ethel Carrick), Anthony Hordern's Fine Art Gallery, Sydney, 6-22 November, 1913, cat. 4
Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London, 1917, cat. 291

'Mrs E.P. Fox's paintings', Argus, 11 July 1913, p. 5

This work is on its original stretcher, with a strip of new canvas added to the margins for strengthening. UV inspection confirms that there has been no restoration or retouching. It appears that the cupped and cracked impasto layers have been flattened and stabilised and there appears to be some flattening of the surface generally. The painting appears not to have been evenly cleaned and has recently been varnished. Spot testing indicates ready solubility of varnish layers.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Ethel Carrick and her husband Emmanuel Phillips Fox were both particularly drawn to the light, and especially the full sunlight of summer; their paintings of seaside holidaymakers – whether  at the French resorts of St Malô, Trouville, Deauville, Dinard and Royan, or on Sydney Harbour – are among their gayest and most engaging works. But while Fox was to a significant degree a painter of the single figure or carefully-disposed ensemble, Carrick was more of a connoisseur of crowds. As early as 1908, one critic noted that  'the supreme skill of the artist was found in her subtle handling of outdoor groups of people in frequented parts of a populated city ... there was nothing studied in the grouping of the crowd of figures which appeared in the scene and life and movement were splendidly suggested.'¹

The present work, painted in France a year or so before the celebrated Manly Beach – summer is here (1913, Manly Art Gallery) shows just such a crowd. Below town walls and between rows of bathing boxes, fashionable bourgeois tourists – the men in straw boaters and blazers, the women in wide-brimmed feathered hats and flowing white summer dresses – sit, stroll or pause to chat along a waterfront promenade. On a small stretch of beach in the middle distance children disport in the shallows under the eyes of nannies and nurses, while the whole is edged on the left by a cobalt sea and distant shore.

The painting is typical of Carrick's best work in the way its loose, rapid brushstrokes cohere in completely convincing and subtly expressive figures; the mother turning to her child in the right foreground, for example, or the robed figure entering one of the bathing boxes. As a reviewer of her 1913 exhibition observed, 'these works are not, as Sir Joshua Reynolds said, "to be smelt", but must be viewed at the proper focussing distance, say about five feet, and then the seeming hasty and heavily laden swift passages of paint will 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.'²  The painting is certainly informed by the plein-air, Impressionist spirit, but equally it evinces a more progressive feeling for 'pure' colour and flat pattern, as in the work of the Nabis Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard. Indeed, it was around the time of this work that Carrick's husband wrote to his friend Hans Heysen: 'My wife works away and is doing some very interesting & personal stuff – She is Societaire of Autumn Salon & is very keen on modern outlook.'³

At once busy and bold, vibrant and subtle, the present work is a particularly fine example of Carrick's pre-war painting. It is here identified for the first time as High tide at St Malô.  An important painting within the artist's oeuvre, it was first exhibited at the New Salon in Paris, then in Carrick's solo exhibition in Melbourne in 1913, and again several years later at London's Royal Academy.

We are most grateful to Dr Ruth Zubans for her assistance in cataloguing this work.

1.  'Parisian painting in Melbourne. Ethel Carrick (Mrs. E. Phillips Fox)', Art and Architecture, vol. 5, 1908, p. 194
2.  'Mrs E.P. Fox's paintings', Argus, 11 July 1913, p. 5
3.  Emanuel Phillips Fox to Hans Heysen, 13 September 1911, cited in Ruth Zubans, E. Phillips Fox: his life and art, Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 1995, p. 181
4.  Contemporary postcards of the Breton seaside resort show that at low tide below the town fortifications, promenade and bathing boxes, a broad sandy beach was exposed. The present work shows the sea reaching up to the breakwater with just a small hump of dry land left uncovered on the left. A preliminary study for the present work sold recently in Europe as Promenade at St Malô (Thierry Lannon & Associés, Douarnenez, 19 July 2008, lot 147).