Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

to depict the well-dressed, well-behaved children of the upper classes (or sometimes the pathetic or mischievous children of the lower orders). Prurient paintings of naked little girls appeared often enough in major exhibitions throughout the period to indicate that there was a good market for them.6 Fox's Bathing hour was accepted by the fashionable annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy in 1910 and the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1912, although the work was not sold in his lifetime. I cannot escape the feeling that Fox was expressing something other than an idealised maternal tenderness in this painting. Indeed, although the mother is drying the child's arm, there is no sense of a relationship between them, unlike the little study, The beach at Trouville, where the nanny pulls the child towards her in order to dry her more effectively. In Bathing hour, the mother almost holds the child at a distance, while the child turns away from her. The privacy given by the shadow was, of course, no privacy, and the sheer unlikeliness of seeing the naked child on a public beach suggests perhaps that the painting could have been a variant on the long, mythic theme of the female nude in nature. Indeed, it may have initiated a series of paintings of adult women nudes about which Fox wrote in September 1911: 'Since we have been in Paris, painting nudes out of doors, in our garden — we have fixed things up so no one can see, and we are not disturbed .. .7 These were small immediate oil studies, presumably useful for his larger studio re-creations of plein air effects, such as Summer c.1912 (The Art Gallery of New South Wales) and The bathers c.1912 (Dr Joseph Brown Collection).8 It should be emphasised that in the exhibitions to which Fox sent his works, paintings of the nude — in particular the female nude — were seen as the height of artistic endeavour. The bathers depicts the traditional theme of woman at one with nature: it shows a nude woman seated on the grass, her skin dappled with sunlight as it falls through foliage. A slightly incongruous striped garment on which the woman sits reinforces the sense that she is a modern woman, a professional model, and suggests that Fox could not escape into mythology as his friend and fellow expatriate Rupert Bunny was able to do in his paintings of nymphs. Paintings of contemporary nudes had to be generalised because they could not suggest that respectable middle-class women could be naked under their elaborate clothing. Curiously, the painting of the little girl naked on the beach could be contemporary in ways that adult nudes could not. A clue to the meaning of Bathing hour might be found in Mary Cassatt's Mother and child c.1905. This work, in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, shows a naked child on the lap of a woman in a rich boudoir gown; the mother's profile is captured in a mirror, while, encouraged by her mother, the little girl solemnly studies her own image. Mother and child suggests the process by which a young bourgeois girl must learn to present her body, shaped by fashion and etiquette, to society. Cassatt's painting embodies the contrast between childhood innocence and adult social artifice. Fox could well have seen the work, but even if he had not, it provides evidence about contemporary thinking about a girl child. His Bathing hour suggests a tension between the child's naked body and the elaborate gowns and parasols of the ladies on the beach. The clothed children represent an intermediate stage of socialisation. Even the loose dress worn by the mother — and perhaps influenced by the 'natural dress' campaign of late nineteenth-century Aestheticism — depended on corsets for its long fluid line. One could then interpret Bathing hour as a discourse on the relationship between the natural and the artificial. While society gave lip-service to the notion of childhood innocence and naturalness, the bourgeois child was taught from infancy to distrust and even fear its body. Indeed, the concept of 'naturalness' was a loaded one: woman was believed to be closer to nature than man, because she was governed by her biological body, while he was endowed with reason and could transcend the body. Respectable middle-class women thus had to be controlled, their bodies shaped by corsets and layers of fabric and constrained by elaborate social ritual. Little girls had to learn all this. In this context, I will again quote Fox's words: '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', ft is the painter's role to master nature — and therefore the feminine. Fox obviously presents the beach as a place of pure enjoyment in which one can experience the delights of water and sunlight, of lovely clothes, of the joys of childhood. Yet for all that, it gives me a sense of fleeting sadness. This may derive from an awareness of the tensions within these bodies or from knowledge of the imminent demise of this elegant, leisured world in the horrors of the First World War which broke out within five years. The emotion may also derive from the very fragility of the moment. It reminds me that just before Fox went to the Channel coast to begin his paintings of beach society, he had offered to paint a copy of Watteau's Pilgrimage to the island of Cythera 1717.9This painting, above all others, embodies the bitter-sweet transience of pleasure and the fragility of erotic love, and may have tinged Fox's emotions as he meditated on his memories of the beach in his Paris studio. Virginia Spate is Power Professor of Fine A rt at the University of Sydney. NATURE AND ARTIFICE 111