Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

NATURE AND ARTIFICE Emanuel Phillips Fox Bathing hour Virginia Spate Facing page E. Phillips Fox Australia/France 1865-1915 Bathing hour c.1909 Oil on canvas 183.5x113.5cm Purchased 1946 Queensland Art Gallery Above E. Phillips Fox The bathing hour 1909 Oil on canvas 178.8x110.5cm Castlemaine Art Gallery & Historical Museum I t is easy to see why Emanuel Phillips Fox's Bathing hour c.1909 is one of . the most popular paintings in the Queensland Art Gallery: sun sparkling on a golden beach; a pretty woman in a lovely dress tenderly drying a chubby little girl; a tranquil blue sea; children bathing and making sandcastles; elegant ladies and one — rather diminished — gentleman in conversation by the shore; figures dangling their feet over the edge of a rowing boat... It is a completely enclosed world, almost like a dream; a dream of an endless secure golden childhood; a dream that is vividly real in our memories, so real that it can evoke the excited cries of the children, the soft whisper of the tiny waves on the shore ... To Australians, it is tempting immediately to associate this work with one of the aspects of Australian culture that is assumed to be essential to life: the culture of the beach; the pleasures of the body bathed by the sun, absorbed by the water... It is, however, a painting of a French beach, and of a culture very different from our own. After four years in Fondon, Fox and his wife, the painter Ethel Carrick, had gone to live in Paris in 1905. He kept up his contacts with his family and with artistic life in Australia, but like so many of his generation Fox felt that he needed the artistic life of Europe: the challenge of tradition and of a far larger range of contemporary art. There he could exhibit in the major annual exhibitions — the Royal Academy in Fondon and the Salon in Paris — and could hope to live by his sales as he could not in Australia. Fox had been trained in the academic mode of representing the human figure, learned in an arduous process of drawing from plaster casts and then from the model; students had to master learning to drawbefore being allowed to paint, compose compositions and use colour. Fox had, however, also been bitten early by pleinairism, the movement that insisted that pictures be painted outdoors before the 'motif'. Pleinairism made painters infinitely conscious of the brilliance and changeability of light, and thus led many of them to Impressionism. In an interview in 1913, Fox expressed his sense both of the difference and of the necessary interrelationship between working in nature and in the studio: In art everything must start from the springboard of nature ... Not that I condemn painting in the studio. One must go to nature to learn, as before nature one is objective, a servant. But in the studio one paints to express oneself, and must be a master.1 This statement perhaps explains the puzzling relationship between the Queensland Art Gallery's Bathing hour and a very similar version in the Castlemaine Art Gallery, Victoria, which I will call The bathing hour (version 1). This is almost the same size as the Queensland Art Gallery work (both are about 180cm high) and is thus not a quick study for it. The Castlemaine painting is the more spontaneous in handling, and suggests a more immediate reaction to the scene: this may be seen in the broad painterly strokes that shape the mother's dress. The foreground figures are located more convincingly on the beach than in Bathing hour: the mother's head overlaps the figures of a woman and child at the edge of the sea, and the girls playing in the sand are brought closer — even the line of the sandcastle leads directly to the little girl's head. In these ways the mother and daughter are more closely related to the casual pleasures of the other figures. In the Queensland Art Gallery painting, Fox either suppresses the figures of the woman and child by the sea or moves them to the left, joining them with the social group. The graceful curve of the mother's profile is thus isolated against the sea. Fox also eliminates the more prominent gentleman by the seashore, so that this is an almost completely feminised world. In The bathing hour (version 1), the woman's profile is like a darkened silhouette, which effaces the pretty detail one can see in the profile in the Queensland Art Gallery painting. This shadowing would be closer to what one would see in a face silhouetted against the brilliant reflective light of the 108 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965