From gardens to beaches: Ethel Carrick’s dazzling Australian sketches

Two small paintings of a summer’s day in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden are the most surprising works, to my mind, in the National Gallery of Australia’s Ethel Carrick exhibition.

They were both painted in 1908 on the English-born artist’s first visit to Australia, as she accompanied her husband and fellow artist Emanuel Phillips Fox. These little gems, both captioned Esquisse en Australia (Sketch in Australia), are rapid-fire approximations of the pleasure the artist takes in seeing the gardens and those who love them.

Ethel Carrick’s Esquisse en Australie (Sketch in Australia) 1908.

These lively paintings are possibly the first post-impressionist works to be made in Australia. Two girls swing outwards, implying a giddy dance. Other children run, while their elders move at a slower pace and small groups picnic on the grass. A few flicks of the brush define each lively figure, while broad strokes of green mingled with blue provide deep shade from an unseen tree, making the sun-filled grass seem all the brighter. After surprising exhibition audiences in Melbourne, the paintings returned to Paris with their creator.

In the exhibition, these little gems are grouped with other works from Carrick’s first visit to Australia when she was entranced by Sydney’s beach culture, as well as the beauty of the Harbour. Earlier in the exhibition, the viewer sees her growth from student work at the Slade under the enlightened academic Henry Tonks, to her discovery in France of the liberated colour and form of the post-impressionists. Her paintings of beaches in France show pleasure in the patterning of candy-striped tents and the formal dress of the visitors parading along the shore. The hedonism of Australian beachgoers must have been a revelation.

Carrick and her husband were both devoted to art but took different directions in their approach to painting. After their 1905 marriage, they settled in Paris, sharing a studio in Montparnasse. While Fox continued to develop his academic impressionist style, Carrick joined the lively community of women artists experimenting with colour and form, celebrating the life of people in the streets. Her paintings of people in the Luxembourg Gardens show fashionable people on display as they take the air. The children roll hoops, and little ones explore what is on the ground. Elegant dresses are defined with rapid strokes of white or pink for the young, and darker tones for the old. While these works show an easy connection to the paintings of Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden, there is a difference. The Parisians stay on defined pathways, the Sydneysiders play on the grass.

Christmas Day on Manly Beach, 1913, by Ethel Carrick.Credit: Manly Art Gallery & Museum Collection

For the rest of her life, Carrick moved between Australia and France, making extended visits to other places on the way to either destination. In 1913, on her second visit to Sydney, she painted her masterpiece, Christmas Day on Manly Beach. It is the best summary of the contrast between the cultures of north and south, between formality and liberty. To a background of surfers catching waves, people crowd on the beach to soak up the sun and enjoy the day.

Carrick and Fox did not stay in any one place for a long time. As with many artists of the time, they travelled to paint in fashionable holiday destinations – Venice, Brittany, and above all, the French colonies of north Africa. For those fleeing a Parisian winter, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia provided both sun and exotic colour. There are strong similarities between Carrick’s small paintings of street scenes and those of her contemporary Hilda Rix Nicholas. Many of these are best described as pleasant mementoes. One work, however, stands out as different in both concept and execution.

Ethel Carrick, Laveuses algériennes (Algerian women washing clothes in a stream), c 1911.

The exhibition’s curator, Deborah Hart, has placed Laveuses algeriennes (Algerian women washing clothes in a stream) on its own screen. It well deserves the special attention. The subject matter, working women scrubbing clothes against stones, is less important than the impastoed patterns of paint, the way blue strokes of paint curl in the foreground, how they are balanced by the deep pinks of the washerwomen’s clothes, the intensity of the glowing yellows and the different patterning of the greens evoking vegetation. This painting is the closest Carrick came to painting pure abstraction and was revolutionary for its time. Laveuses algeriennes remained unsold at the time of her death.

Ethel Carrick, Paris Park Scene, 1906.

In 1914, Carrick and Fox’s life of leisurely travel and art took them to Tahiti, where she painted At Sunset, a small, almost abstract, study of clouds reflecting on sea. This painting could almost be a requiem for the life they had led, as the declaration of war sent them back to Australia. The following year, after a short illness, Emanuel Phillips Fox died. For the rest of her life, Carrick worked tirelessly to place his works in public collections and to ensure his reputation as a leading Australian artist.

When she was first in Paris, Carrick had become involved in the Theosophical Society, a spiritualist movement that had first emerged in the late 19th century and was especially attractive to artists and writers. In Sydney, its cultural impact was such that it had its own radio station, 2GB. Some of the most surprising paintings in the exhibition are those Carrick painted in India in 1935, after she visited Adyar for the society’s Diamond Jubilee Convention. While her study of the Deputy Commissioner’s garden, Agra, India, evokes memories of her earlier work, her paintings of Kashmir are completely different. Two small paintings in gouache are so light and delicate that they could almost be by another hand.

The Theosophical concept of astral light appears most strikingly in her 1942 painting, National Defence League depot, St Michael’s Hall Sydney, which shows women making camouflage nets under the glow of a rising sun insignia. Sadly, the Australian War Memorial, which owns the painting, declined to lend it to the exhibition. It should have been the high point of the final group of paintings showing the volunteer work undertaken by many women while their husbands and sons were away. It is, however, reproduced in the scholarly catalogue that accompanies the exhibition. The catalogue is an essential purchase for anyone interested in Australian art and its contexts.

Ethel Carrick is at the National Gallery of Australia until April 27.