Sur la plage

Ethel Carrick Fox was an internationally acclaimed impressionist and post-impressionist painter, renowned for her sensitivity to colour, light and movement. The British-born artist exhibited at many of the world’s most prestigious exhibition venues and in the radical Salon d’Automne, to which she was selected sociétaire in 1911. Travelling widely and adventurously until her death in 1952, Carrick relished painting outdoors, where she could capture the energy of populated markets, beaches and gardens – in Europe, North Africa, South Asia and Australia.

Sur la plage (On the beach), c.1910, was painted during Carrick’s most celebrated period and exhibits all of the joy and freedom of an artist working en plein air. Recording the energy and elegance of the Belle Époque, Carrick shows women and children at leisure on the French beach of Royan, where she frequently spent her summers with her Australian husband,

the artist Emanuel Phillips Fox. Most radically, the artist’s loose and confident brushstrokes expose the wood-grain of her preferred painting support, a panel of 9 x 12 inches, which could be transported wet in her custom paintbox. The wood-grain is incorporated into the tonality and composition of the painting and contributes to the artist’s aim of portraying, in her words, a sense of ‘arrested movement’.

Elle Freak, Associate Curator of Australian Paintings and Sculpture