Ethel Carrick, later Ethel Carrick Fox (7 February 1872 – 17 June 1952) was an English Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painter. Much of her career was spent in France and in Australia, where she was associated with the movement known as the Heidelberg School.
Life
Ethel Carrick was born in Uxbridge, Middlesex, to Emma (Filmer) Carrick and Albert William Carrick,[1] a wealthy draper.[2][3] The family of ten children lived at Brookfield House, Uxbridge.[4] She trained in London at the Guildhall School of Music and at the Slade School of Fine Art under Henry Tonks (ca. 1898-1903).[3] She married the Australian Impressionist painter Emanuel Phillips Fox in 1905.[5] They moved to Paris, where they remained until 1913.[2] She travelled widely in Europe, North Africa, and the South Pacific (Tahiti) during this period and made trips to Australia in 1908 and 1913.[2]
The outbreak of World War I brought Carrick and her husband to Melbourne, Australia, where they organised to raise war funds from artists and to support the French Red Cross.[2]
Emanuel died of cancer in 1915, and the following year Carrick began two decades of travels that took her through the Middle East, South Asia including India, and Europe. She returned intermittently to Australia to exhibit her work and go out on painting expeditions around the country.[2] In the 1920s, she was recommended by the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris as a private teacher of still life painting, and she counted a number of Australians and Americans in Paris among her students.[3]
Mainly a painter, Carrick is known for her floral still life, landscapes and scenes of outdoor urban life in parks and on beaches. Some of these draw on her international travels, such as her paintings of outdoor markets in the Middle East and elsewhere.[2] In the 1920s, she began painting flower studies, which overall are more conventional than her earlier work.[3] In the 1930s, she created some lithographs, and during World War II, which she spent in Australia, she painted some scenes of women war workers.[3]
Carrick began as an Impressionist plein air painter but fairly quickly moved to a more Post-Impressionist style featuring blockier compositions and sharper colour contrasts.[3] Some of the works produced around 1911-12 are distinctly Fauvist in their strong colours, high abstraction, and loose handling of the paint.[3]
In 1911, she became sociétaire of the Salon d'Automne, and she served as a jury member from 1912 to around 1925, both unusual positions for women to hold and marks of the high regard in which she was held by the Paris art world.[2][3] Prior to World War I, she also served as the vice-president of the International Union of Women Artists. Late in her career, in the 1940s and 1950s, she exhibited with the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors.[3]
In her lifetime, Carrick's reputation was eclipsed by her husband's, in part because she spent a good deal of her time promoting his career rather than her own, lobbying Australian collectors and curators to buy his work and arranging exhibitions both while he was alive and posthumously.[2][3] In recent years, her reputation has been rising, and critics today consider her work more adventurous than that of her husband.[3][7] In 1996, one of her paintings set an auction record of A$105,500 for works by an Australian woman artist,[7] and the following year saw the publication of a biography, Ethel Carrick Fox: Travels and Triumphs of a Post-Impressionist by art historian Susanna de Vries.[8] Her Market Under Trees, sold by Sotheby's in 1999 for A$266,500, was bought at auction for just over A$1 million in 2008.[9]
In 1993, the Waverley City Gallery in Melbourne held the exhibition "Capturing the Orient: Hilda Rix Nicholas & Ethel Carrick in the East", and in 2011, the Queensland Art Gallery held a joint retrospective of the work of Carrick and her husband.[10]
1913: 'Paintings by Mrs E Phillips Fox (Miss Ethel Carrick)', The Guildhall, Melbourne, 11 - 26 July[15][16][17]
1913: 'Exhibition of Pictures by Mrs E Phillips Fox (Ethel Carrick)', Anthony Hordern's Fine Art Gallery, Sydney, 6 - 22 November[18][19][20][21][22][23]
1916: 'Exhibition of Oil Paintings by Mrs E Phillips Fox', Anthony Hordern's Fine Art Gallery, Sydney, April
1925: 'Exhibition of Paintings by Ethel Carrick (Mrs E Phillips Fox)', The New Gallery, Melbourne, 2 -13 June
1928: 'Exposition Ethel Carrick', Galerie de la Palette Française, Paris, 5 -19 June
1933: 'Ethel Carrick (Mrs E Phillips Fox) Exhibition of Pictures', Everyman's Lending Library, Melbourne, 24 May - 7 June
1949: 'Pictures by Ethel Carrick (Mrs E Phillips Fox)', Melbourne Book Club Gallery, 20 June - 2 July
1949: 'Exhibition of Pictures by Ethel Carrick (Mrs E Phillips Fox)', John Martin's Gallery, Adelaide , 4 - 18 October
1979: 'Ethel Carrick (Mrs E Phillips Fox): A Retrospective Exhibition', Geelong Art Gallery, 30 March - 4 May 1979 ; toured to SH Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 11 May - 3 June; University Art Museum, Brisbane, 13 June - 5 July
Group exhibitions held during the artist's lifetime
1903: Society of Oil Painters, London, 19 October - 12 December
1910: Societe Les Quelques, Galerie des Artistes Modernes, Paris, February
1910: Salon d'Automne, Paris
1911: Societe Les Quelques, Galerie des Artistes Modernes, Paris, February
1911: Salon d'Automne, Paris
1911: Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris
1912: Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris
1912: Salon d'Automne, Paris
1913: Societe des Peintres Orientalistes Français 21e Exposition, Grand Palais, Paris, 2-28 February
1915: 'Australian Artists War Fund Exhibition', Royal Art Society Rooms, Sydney, 9 March
1915: 'Australian Art Association 3rd Annual Exhibition', Athenaeum, Melbourne, 7-21 October
1915: Red Cross Fund, Melbourne, March
1916: 'Art Curio and Antique Exhibition for the French Week Appeal Fund', Town Hall, Melbourne, July
1916: Royal Society of Oil Painters, London, November
1917: Royal Academy, London
1918: 'Salon des Poilus, Exhibition of Pictures for Sale', Athenaeum Gallery, Melbourne, 6-20 July (in aid of the French Red Cross)
1918: 'Exposition de l'Arc-en-Ciel', Galerie de Goupil & Cie, Paris, 8 October - 3 November
1919: Salon d' Automne, Paris: 315 Mme de Marquette
1920: Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris
1921: Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris
1921: Salon d'Automne, Paris
1921: Societe des Artistes lndependants, Paris
1921: 'Exposition de la Societe coloniale des Artistes Français', Societe des Artistes Français, Grand Palais des Champs Elysees, Paris
1922: Salon d'Automne, Paris
1922: Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris
1923: Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris
1923: Salon d' Automne, Paris
1923: 'Group of Australian Artists', Panton Galleries, London, November
1924: 'Exhibition of Paintings and Sculptures by Australian Artists in Europe', Faculty of Arts, London, 23 June -12 July
1924: Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris
1924: Salon d'Automne, Paris
1926: Salon d'Automne, Paris
1927: Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris
1927: Salon d'Automne, Paris
1928: Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris
1928: Salon d'Automne, Paris
1928: International exhibition, Bordeaux: Manly Beach - summer is here (awarded diplome d'honneur)
1929: Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris
1929: Salon d'Automne, Paris
1929: Societe des Amis des Arts de Bordeaux, Paris
1930: Salon d'Automne, Paris
1930: Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris
1930: Societe des Amis des Arts de Bordeaux, Paris
1931: Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris
1931: Salon d'Automne, Paris
1932: Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris
1931: Salon d'Automne, Paris
1933: Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris
1933: Everyman's Lending Library, Melbourne, May
1934: 'An Exhibition by Melbourne Painters', Athenaeum Gallery, Melbourne, 27 February- 10 March (in aid of the Hermannsburg water supply, Central Australia)
1935: Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris
1936: Royal Academy, London
1937: Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris
1937: Royal Academy, London
1937: Salon d'Automne, Paris
1937: Royal Academy, London
1937: Salon d' Automne
1939: Royal Academy, London
1939: Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris
1943-45: Victorian Artists' Society, Melbourne
1944: 'Paintings by Ethel Phillips Fox, Jean Sutherland and Sybil Craig', KozminskyLower Gallery, Melbourne, 21 November- 1 December
^ abcdefghijklmPeers, Juliet. "Fox, Ethel (Carrick". In Dictionary of Women Artists: Artists, J-Z, ed. Delia Gaze. pp. 545-46.
^"Deaths," The Morning Post (London), 8 Feb 1899, pg. 1
^Goddard, Angela & Queensland Art Gallery (2011). Art, love & life : Ethel Carrick & E Phillips Fox. Queensland Art Gallery, South Brisbane, Qld
^"Obituary - Ethel Carrick Fox". Obituaries Australia, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. 24 June 1952. Retrieved 3 December 2024.
^"Rare Pictures". Newsletter: an Australian Paper for Australian People (Sydney, NSW : 1900 - 1919). 29 November 1913. p. 5. Retrieved 20 April 2021.
Further reading
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Ethel Carrick.
Howe, Elin. "Ethel Carrick Fox: The Cheat or the Cheated?". In Wallflowers and Witches: Women and Culture in Australia, 1910-1945, ed. Maryanne Dever. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994, pp. 105–14
Pigot, John. "Les femmes orientalistes: Hilda Rix Nichols and Edith Carrick Fox in the East". Strange Women: Essays in Art and Gender, ed. Jeannette Hoorn. University of Melbourne Press, 1994, pp. 155–68
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