Ethel Carrick Explained

Ethel Carrick
Birth Date:7 February 1872
Birth Place:Uxbridge, Middlesex, England
Death Place:Melbourne, Australia
Movement:Impressionism, Post-Impressionism
Spouse:Emanuel Phillips Fox

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. The family of ten children lived at Brookfield House, Uxbridge.[2] She trained in London at the Guildhall School of Music and at the Slade School of Fine Art under Henry Tonks (ca. 1898-1903). She married the Australian Impressionist painter Emanuel Phillips Fox in 1905.[3] They moved to Paris, where they remained until 1913. She travelled widely in Europe, North Africa, and the South Pacific (Tahiti) during this period and made trips to Australia in 1908 and 1913.

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.

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. 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.

She died in Melbourne in 1952, aged 80.

Art career and critical estimation

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. In the 1920s, she began painting flower studies, which overall are more conventional than her earlier work. 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.

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. Some of the works produced around 1911-12 are distinctly Fauvist in their strong colours, high abstraction, and loose handling of the paint.

Carrick first showed her work in London in 1903. She exhibited at the Paris Salon d'Automne from 1906 onwards, the London Royal Academy of Arts, the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts (from 1906 on), and various progressive galleries in Melbourne and Sydney, Australia (from 1908 on). In addition to her own solo and group exhibitions, she was in dual shows with her husband at the Melbourne Athenaeum in 1914 and again in 1944.

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. 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.

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. In recent years, her reputation has been rising, and critics today consider her work more adventurous than that of her husband. In 1996, one of her paintings set an auction record of A$105,500 for works by an Australian woman artist, 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. 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.[4]

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.

Exhibitions

Solo

Group exhibitions held during the artist's lifetime

Further reading

Notes and References

  1. "Marriages," Daily News (London) Monday 28 Mar 1870, p.1
  2. "Deaths," The Morning Post (London), 8 Feb 1899, pg. 1
  3. Goddard, Angela & Queensland Art Gallery (2011). Art, love & life : Ethel Carrick & E Phillips Fox. Queensland Art Gallery, South Brisbane, Qld
  4. Peter Coster, "Winning bid", Herald Sun (Melb), Thu, 24 Apr 2008
  5. Argus, Tue, 4 Aug 1908
  6. "Parisian Paintings: A Blaze Of Color. Mrs Fox's Collection," The Herald (Melb), Tue, 4 Aug 1908
  7. "Miss Ethel Carrick's Pictures", Table Talk, Thu, 6 Aug 1908
  8. "Social Notes", The Australasian, Thu, 6 Aug 1908
  9. News: 1913-07-09. SUNLIGHT AND MOTION.. 7. Herald (Melbourne, Vic. : 1861 - 1954). 2021-04-20.
  10. News: 1913-07-12. MRS. E. PHILLIPS FOX'S PICTURES. 48. Leader (Melbourne, Vic. : 1862 - 1918, 1935). 2021-04-20.
  11. News: 1913-07-24. MRS. E. PHILLIPS FOX'S PICTURES.. 41. Punch (Melbourne, Vic. : 1900 - 1918; 1925). 2021-04-20.
  12. News: 1913-10-08. IN SOCIETY AND OUT.. 6. Sun (Sydney, NSW : 1910 - 1954). 2021-04-20.
  13. News: 1913-11-06. SYDNEY JOTTINGS. 28. Freeman's Journal (Sydney, NSW : 1850 - 1932). 2021-04-20.
  14. News: 1913-11-07. MRS. FOX'S PAINTINGS. 8. Evening News (Sydney, NSW : 1869 - 1931). 2021-04-20.
  15. News: 1913-11-07. IMPRESSIONISM.. 7. Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 - 1954). 2021-04-20.
  16. News: 1913-11-09. DISTINGUISHED WOMAN ARTIST. 19. Sun (Sydney, NSW : 1910 - 1954). 2021-04-20.
  17. News: 1913-11-29. Rare Pictures.. 5. Newsletter: an Australian Paper for Australian People (Sydney, NSW : 1900 - 1919). 2021-04-20.

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