E. Phillips Fox
Encyclopedia
Education
Fox was born on 12 March 1865 to Alexander Fox and Rosetta Phillips at 12 Victoria ParadeVictoria Street, Melbourne
Victoria Street is one of the major thoroughfares of inner Melbourne. Running east to west, Victoria Street touches the Hoddle Grid at the intersection of La Trobe Street and Spring Street, opposite the Carlton Gardens. It runs from its terminus at the intersection of Munster Terrace in North...
in Fitzroy
Fitzroy, Victoria
Fitzroy is an inner city suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 2 km north-east from Melbourne's central business district. Its Local Government Area is the City of Yarra. Its borders are Alexandra Parade , Victoria Parade , Smith Street and Nicholson Street. Fitzroy is Melbourne's...
, Melbourne, into a legal family whose firm, DLA Phillips Fox, still exists. He studied art at the National Gallery School in Melbourne from 1878 until 1886 under G. F. Folingsby
George Frederick Folingsby
George Frederick Folingsby was an Irish/Australian painter and art educator.Folingsby was born in the County of Wicklow, Ireland. At the age of 18 he emigrated to Canada. Later he went to New York, studied drawing and contributed illustrations to magazines of the day...
; his fellow students included John Longstaff
John Longstaff
Sir John Campbell Longstaff was an Australian painter, war artist and a five-time winner of the Archibald Prize. He was a cousin of Will Longstaff, also a painter....
, Frederick McCubbin
Frederick McCubbin
Frederick McCubbin was an Australian painter who was prominent in the Heidelberg School, one of the more important periods in Australia's visual arts history....
, David Davies
David Davies (artist)
David Davies was an Australian artist associated with the Heidelberg School, the first significant Western art movement in Australia.Davies was born in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia....
and Rupert Bunny
Rupert Bunny
Rupert Charles Wulsten Bunny was an Australian painter, born in St Kilda, Victoria. He achieved success and critical acclaim as an expatriate in fin-de-siècle Paris....
.
In 1886 he travelled to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Julian
Académie Julian
The Académie Julian was an art school in Paris, France.Rodolphe Julian established the Académie Julian in 1868 at the Passage des Panoramas, as a private studio school for art students. The Académie Julian not only prepared students to the exams at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, but offered...
, where he gained first prize in his year for design and École des Beaux-Arts
École des Beaux-Arts
École des Beaux-Arts refers to a number of influential art schools in France. The most famous is the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, now located on the left bank in Paris, across the Seine from the Louvre, in the 6th arrondissement. The school has a history spanning more than 350 years,...
(1887–1890), where his masters included William-Adolphe Bouguereau
William-Adolphe Bouguereau
William-Adolphe Bouguereau was a French academic painter. William Bouguereau was a traditionalist; in his realistic genre paintings he used mythological themes, making modern interpretations of Classical subjects, with an emphasis on the female human body.-Life and career :William-Adolphe...
and Jean-Léon Gérôme
Jean-Léon Gérôme
Jean-Léon Gérôme was a French painter and sculptor in the style now known as Academicism. The range of his oeuvre included historical painting, Greek mythology, Orientalism, portraits and other subjects, bringing the Academic painting tradition to an artistic climax.-Life:Jean-Léon Gérôme was born...
, both among the most famous artists of the time. While at Beaux Arts, he was awarded a first prize for painting. He was greatly influenced by the fashionable school of en plein air
En plein air
En plein air is a French expression which means "in the open air", and is particularly used to describe the act of painting outdoors.Artists have long painted outdoors, but in the mid-19th century working in natural light became particularly important to the Barbizon school and Impressionism...
Impressionism
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...
. He exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1890, and returned to Melbourne in 1891.
Australia
In October 1892, Fox opened the Melbourne Art School with Tudor St George TuckerTudor St George Tucker
Tudor St George Tucker was born in Finchley in Middlesex the son of Captain Charlton Nassau Tucker, a retired cavalry officer in the East India Company's service. He came to Melbourne in 1881 in search of a healthier climate...
, where he taught European ideas and techniques. He had a considerable influence as a teacher on Australian art during this period. In his brief career with the Heidelberg School
Heidelberg School
The Heidelberg School was an Australian art movement of the late 19th century. The movement has latterly been described as Australian Impressionism....
, Fox was noted for his figure compositions and subdued landscape
Landscape art
Landscape art is a term that covers the depiction of natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, and especially art where the main subject is a wide view, with its elements arranged into a coherent composition. In other works landscape backgrounds for figures can still...
s, often painted as nocturne
Nocturne (painting)
In visual arts, nocturne painting is a visual language that is often used within realistic treatments to depict scenes evocative of night or subjects as they appear in a veil of light, in twilight, or in the absence of direct light. Many artists develop their own methods to create nocturnes unique...
s, utilising a low-key palette in which the colours, although limited in range, were related to each other "with the utmost delicacy and inventiveness," to quote Australian art scholar James Gleeson
James Gleeson
James Timothy Gleeson was Australia's foremost artist. He was also a poet, critic, writer and curator. He played a significant role in the Australian art scene, including serving on the board of the National Gallery of Australia.-Early life:Gleeson was born in the Sydney district of Hornsby and he...
. The emphasis on landscapes may have been at least partly a response to market demand – landscapes found more ready acceptance, and Art Students, a figurative genre painting now recognised as one of his best, first exhibited at the Victorian Art Society in 1895, remained unsold until 1943.
Europe
In 1901 he was given a commission under the Gilbee bequest to paint a historical picture of The Landing of Captain Cook for the Melbourne gallery. One of the conditions of the bequest was that the picture must be painted overseas and Fox accordingly left for London.He explained his decision to base himself in the European art world in a 1903 letter to Frederick McCubbin: "I am quite certain that the only way is to exhibit alongside the best of the work here, and that one man shows, and colonial or Australian exhibitions in London are of very little good." Both the Royal Academy
Royal Academy
The Royal Academy of Arts is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly, London. The Royal Academy of Arts has a unique position in being an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects whose purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and...
and the Salon were bastions of establishment art, remote from the modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
of Braque
Georges Braque
Georges Braque[p] was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art style known as Cubism.-Early Life:...
, Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
and the School of Paris
School of Paris
School of Paris refers to two distinct groups of artists — a group of medieval manuscript illuminators, and a group of non-French artists working in Paris before World War I...
, and Fox's biographer, art historian Ruth Zubans, describes the Salon as celebrating elegance and femininity "...filtered through Impressionist experience and academic training". Fox enjoyed considerable success in Paris and London, becoming in 1894 the first Australian to be awarded a third-class gold medal at the Salon for Portrait of my Cousin (now in the National Gallery of Victoria).
In 1905 he married Ethel Carrick
Ethel Carrick
Ethel Carrick Fox was the wife of painter Emanuel Phillips Fox and a major artist in her own right.Carrick studied at the Slade School. She married E. Phillips Fox in 1905 and moved to Paris...
, an artist of ability. They toured Italy and Spain, then in 1908 settled in Paris, where he was elected an associate of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. He returned to Melbourne on a visit in that year and held a successful one-man show at the Guildhall gallery. Two years later he became a full member of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, the first Australian artist to attain that honour. He was exhibiting regularly at the Royal Academy. In 1912 he was elected a member of the International Society of Painters and in the same year spent some time painting in Spain and Algeria.
Return to Australia
The Argus (Australia)
The Argus was a morning daily newspaper in Melbourne established in 1846 and closed in 1957. Widely known as a conservative newspaper for most of its history, it adopted a left leaning approach from 1949...
writing: "With light and atmosphere always the ruling motive, there is revealed in his themes something of the infinite beauty discoverable in everyday things...". The writer might have had in mind this charming and typical work titled The Arbour.
A final aspect of Fox's oeuvre worth noting are his official commissions. The Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, the most important of these works, holds more than a hint of his teacher Gérôme; and every Australian might be surprised to find that Fox made a copy of Nathaniel Dance
Nathaniel Dance-Holland
Sir Nathaniel Dance-Holland, 1st Baronet was a notable English portrait painter and later a politician.The third son of architect George Dance the Elder, Dance studied art under Francis Hayman, and like many contemporaries also studied in Italy...
's Portrait of Captain Cook, an icon probably so ubiquitous as to have sunk unnoticed but ever-present into the national psyche.
Fox died of cancer in a Fitzroy hospital on 8 October 1915. His wife survived him by 36 years, but there were no children. His nephew Leonard Phillips Fox
Len Fox
Leonard Phillips Fox was an Australian author and painter, born in Melbourne.His uncle was the painter Emanuel Phillips Fox, who died when Len was 10. In 1984 he was to donate a painting Sunlight Effect painted by his uncle ca...
was a prolific writer and pamphleteer for Communist and humanitarian causes.
External links
- E. Phillips Fox, works at the National Gallery of VictoriaNational Gallery of VictoriaThe National Gallery of Victoria is an art gallery and museum in Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1861, it is the oldest and the largest public art gallery in Australia. Since December 2003, NGV has operated across two sites...
- E. Phillips Fox, works at the Art Gallery of New South WalesArt Gallery of New South WalesThe Art Gallery of New South Wales , located in The Domain in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, was established in 1897 and is the most important public gallery in Sydney and the fourth largest in Australia...
- A Love Story (1903), Ballarat Fine Art GalleryBallarat Fine Art GalleryArt Gallery of Ballarat is the oldest and largest regional art gallery in Australia. Established in 1884 as the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery by the citizens of Ballarat both the building and part of its collection is listed on the Victorian Heritage Registerand by the National Trust of Victoria.The...
] - Biography