Ethel Carrick

Beginning her training at the Slade School of Art, Carrick painted Impressionist scenes en plein air before settling into a Post-Impressionist style, preferring the blockier compositions and higher colour contrasts. In 1903, after finishing her studies at Slade, Carrick was featured in her first group exhibition in London followed by several more in Paris and received her first solo exhibition (and her first outside London and Paris) in Melbourne in 1908.

Carrick and her husband, Australian artist Emanuel Phillips Fox whom she married in 1905, travelled widely through Europe, the Middle East and Asia, both painting scenes of daily life as they went. While living in Paris between 1905 and 1913, Carrick saw great success exhibiting at the Societe Les Quelques, the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts and the Salon d’Automne, where she was a sociétaire and jury member. In 1912, she became the vice-president of the International Union of Women Painters, despite having to give up this position after the breakout of WWI when she and her husband returned to Australia, she continued to exhibit with the Union throughout the war.

After Fox died in 1915, Carrick continued painting and travelling but focused her attention on Australia where she arranged many exhibitions of her husband’s work and fought for them to be acquired by Australian galleries (even criticising the National Gallery of Victoria for their staunch traditionalism and lack of Impressionist works) which has propelled his success into the twenty-first century but allowed it to eclipse her own.

Returning to Paris after WWI, she won the prestigious Diploma of Honour at the 1928 International Exhibition of Bordeaux.

Throughout WWII, Carrick championed the work of women in her paintings of Australian women war workers which were featured in her numerous solo exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide as well as internationally in at the Salon d’Automne and the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Royal Academy in London.