Window to the shared worlds of Emanuel Phillips and Ethel Carrick Fox

EMANUEL Phillips and Ethel Carrick Fox are surveyed properly for the first time in a fine exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery.

EMANUEL Phillips and Ethel Carrick Fox, one of relatively few painter couples in Australian art, are surveyed properly for the first time in a fine exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery: a welcome opportunity to consider their oeuvres both comprehensively and in parallel, although the artists were in fact together only for a relatively short period before the Great War.

They were married when Fox was already 40 years old. He was born in Melbourne in 1865, into a legal family whose firm continues to this day, and studied at the National Gallery School from 1878 to 1886, when he moved to Paris, supported by his brothers, to continue his training there. He enrolled at the relatively new Academie Julian, originally established in the Passage des Panoramas (the first of the great Parisian arcades of the 19th century), then at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the successor institution of the pre-revolutionary Academie.

Fox's early teachers included Bouguereau and Gerome, two of the leading academic painters in Paris, and he was soon accepted by the French art establishment; on the other hand, his absence from Australia, from 1886 until his return to Melbourne in 1891, corresponded to the most vigorous period of the Heidelberg School, from the return of Tom Roberts and the start of the artists' camps to the 9 x 5 Exhibition of 1889 and beyond.

Consequently, Fox has very little in common with Roberts or Streeton and their new vision of Australia; he is in many ways much closer to the British and American imitators of the French impressionists, except that he remains grounded in the academic style of the turn of the century, rather like Rupert Bunny, who had been his fellow student in Melbourne and who similarly achieved success in Paris.

The first landscapes that Fox showed on his return were of French subjects, poorly received in an environment marked by pre-Federation nationalism and accustomed to the work of the Heidelberg painters.

The Australian landscapes he began to produce after this were in the late or post-Heidelberg style reminiscent of David Davies, another friend from the National Gallery School.

Moonrise, Heidelberg (1900) is an excellent example of this manner, a picture of twilight, with a full moon rising just after sunset over a rural pond or dam. Roberts and Streeton had painted nocturnes as well as the bright midday scenes for which they are better known, but evening and the ambiguous light effects were particularly typical of the turn of the century.

His figure painting, exemplified by Convalescent (1890), has a very different sensibility from Heidelberg realism; it is like impressionism with an English flavour. The subject is late Victorian and sentimental, a sick girl staring wistfully into the distance in front of a fire. The colour scheme, obviously Whistlerian in intention but without his mastery of chromatic subtlety, is based on the girl's red hair and the white gown and pillow tinted by pink light from the fire with greenish shadows.

Another picture of this time that shows the influence of Whistler as well as the great portrait painter John Singer Sargent -- and a more successful one than Convalescent -- is Portrait of My Cousin (1893-94): the young woman looks out at us with a disarmingly attractive mixture of character and vulnerability, the colour of her cheeks like a deeper hue of the pink of her dress. Not surprisingly, this portrait was awarded a gold medal at the Salon of 1894.

Returning to Melbourne, Fox established the Melbourne School of Art in partnership with Tudor St George Tucker, whom he had known in Paris. Their students were mostly young women, as recorded in one of his best pictures, Art Students (1895), in which a group of young middle-class girls and women in their painting smocks -- seemingly ranging in age from about 14 to 20 -- are busy working on a portrait exercise. The subdued palette and tones and the fact all the girls are looking away and concentrating on something else give the picture an engaging quality of intimacy.

In 1900, Fox received a commission to produce a history painting of the Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770 (1902), which is unfortunately not included in the exhibition or even illustrated in the catalogue. Perhaps it was felt to be so unlike everything else in the exhibition that it would throw the ensemble out of balance, not only stylistically but even in bringing larger historical issues into a painterly world that is mostly devoted to private life.

By the end of the century Fox was anxious to return to Europe and took the opportunity of this commission to travel in 1901 to Paris, London and St Ives in Cornwall, where he could work on models at the seaside for the Cook painting. It was probably at St Ives during the summer of 1901 that he met Ethel Carrick, born in 1872, who had studied at the Slade School (1898-99 and 1902-03) under the celebrated teacher Henry Tonks. They married in 1905.

The couple moved to Paris and from this time onwards their careers ran in parallel until Fox died 10 years later in 1915. They had no children, for reasons that are not clear, and Carrick consequently endured a long and lonely widowhood until her death in 1951, during which she continued to paint but also worked consistently to have Fox's talent recognised and his works acquired by important galleries in Australia.

Both husband and wife enjoyed a success in Paris which naturally tended to keep them there; indeed, they can be seen in hindsight as belonging to group of Australians who, a century ago, effectively became Parisians, and for that reason had little connection with the development of art in Australia. They can easily seem foreign to a narrowly defined history of Australian art, although both great and small expatriates have been rediscovered in recent years.

Both artists take as their subject the middle-class life of the Edwardian period, a world of urban interiors -- a domain of family life under the rule of women -- and of outdoor holiday activities, including life at beach resorts, newly accessible thanks to railways and fashionable at the end of the 19th and in the early 20th centuries.

The interior scenes in particular, such as Fox's Lamplight (c. 1911) or The Lesson (1912), speak of a private domain in which comfortable economic circumstances afford the luxury of a non-utilitarian education and the greatest benefit of bourgeois society: leisure to develop an imaginative life of the mind. Thus the subject of The Lesson is a young woman teaching her daughter to read in an atmosphere of calm and serenity, on what looks like a summer's morning.

On the other hand, this bourgeois world is also one in which much is suppressed or left unspoken; the lives of women in particular, while secure, are also circumscribed. Victorian society carefully segregated the world of home from the realities of money, power and sexuality, just as the practical domain of servants was consigned to separate parts of the house.

This is the sense one gets, partly unintentionally, from Lamplight, in which two women sit quietly while another prepares to pour tea. It is presumably afternoon tea on a wintry afternoon when it is dark by four, which would help to explain the melancholy; but the women are dreamily disconnected, each in her own world, only superficially at peace. The woman with the book makes one think of the heroine of Flaubert's Mme Bovary (1856), whose life is ruined by the fantasies of fiction.

One would expect the nudes to evoke some other dimension of existence, but despite the curious fact one of them lies on a couch with what looks like the house-dress of The Lesson discarded on the bed beside her, there is little sense of the erotic or of being offered a glimpse into some private realm of experience.

There is more animation in the beach scenes and more complexity in the painting of a mother drying a naked child on the sand, at a time when even children were not commonly seen unclothed in public. This painting exists in two versions (Castlemaine and QAG), here shown together for the first time.

The comparison suggests that Fox tried to clarify the composition in the QAG version (presumably the second), removing the figures behind the mother's head, so that it is more clearly profiled against the sea, but in the process leaving her less well integrated with the background. Her shadowed face in the original also imbued the mother and child scene with a quality of intimacy lost when she is illuminated and separated from the shady space occupied by the child.

Carrick's pictures overlap in their subject matter with her husband's, but her style is lighter, brighter and sketchier, and she is more drawn to outdoor scenes such as the Luxembourg Gardens, where children play with their nannies, and markets, such as scenes of the Rue Mouffetard. After Fox's death, most of Carrick's paintings are of subjects such as flower markets, with bright clusters of colour under awnings and tents.

Travel to Venice or Algeria, when constraints of time forced them to work quickly, was an opportunity for both painters to produce some particularly fresh and spontaneous oil sketches. Some of Fox's more studied pictures can seem, in contrast, both overworked and underworked. The colours appear sometimes to be overmixed and rather muddied -- whereas Carrick tends to keep hers fresher -- so that hues become dull and the overall tonal effect is compromised. At the same time, there are pictures where one feels the image could have benefited from greater articulation, such as Al fresco (1904), in which the facial features of the diners remain too amorphous.

A particular mannerism of his -- almost a stylistic tic -- is a weakness for dappled light. Such a love of ambiguous and shifting effects of illumination belongs to the same sensibility that is drawn to sunsets and moonrises, but Fox often overdoes it, exaggerating the intensity of the contrast. Highlights are executed in a heavy impasto, which tends to sit on the surface of the picture and flatten the figures; even Carrick imitates this habit at times.

This is an attractive exhibition that is a valuable opportunity to form an idea of two painters who were talented, even if ultimately rather limited in their technical range and in their poetic imagination. Neither produced many pictures that could be considered especially deep or powerful. But they each left works of distinction and they remind us that the world of early 20th-century Australian art was not only diverse but also unexpectedly cosmopolitan.

Emanuel Phillips and Ethel Carrick Fox
Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, until August 7