E. Phillips Fox

Emanuel Phillips Fox (12 March 1865 – 8 October 1915) was an Australian impressionist painter.

Born and raised in Melbourne, Victoria, Fox studied at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School. He travelled to Paris to study in 1886 and remained in Europe until 1892, when he returned to Melbourne and led what is considered the second phase of the Heidelberg School, an impressionist art movement which had developed in the city during his absence. He spent over a decade in Europe in the early 20th century before finally settling in Melbourne, where he died.

Fox's wife Ethel Carrick was also a noted impressionist painter.

Education Emanuel Phillips Fox was born on 12 March 1865 to the photographer Alexander Fox and Rosetta Phillips at 12 Victoria Parade in Fitzroy, Melbourne, into a family of lawyers whose firm, DLA Piper still exists. He studied art at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in Melbourne from 1878 until 1886 under George Folingsby; and Rupert Bunny. His student Mary Meyer was the subject Fox's portrait of her at age twenty, in the course of which Fox made a finished charcoal drawing. His Whistleresque Portrait of Mary, Daughter of Professor Nanson was exhibited in 1898 at an exhibition of Australian Art in London, at the Grafton Galleries, and is now held in the National Gallery of Victoria. Her husband, Felix Meyer, was Fox's patron. Another student, Ursula Foster, was the model for his model for Fox's Lady in Black and A Love Story.

In his brief career with the Heidelberg School, Fox was noted for his figure compositions and subdued landscapes, often painted as nocturnes, 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 artist and art scholar James Gleeson. 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 Artists Society in 1895, remained unsold until 1943.

Europe

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).

On 9 May 1905, he married the artist Ethel Carrick in St Peter's Church, Ealing. They toured Italy and Spain, then in 1908 settled in Paris. The show was reported with enthusiasm in the local press, the Melbourne Argus 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.

Fox's official commissions form a final notable aspect of his oeuvre. The Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, the most important of these works, shows clear influence of his teacher Gérôme. Fox also made a copy of Nathaniel Dance's Portrait of Captain Cook, an icon so familiar in Australia that it has become part of the national visual memory.

Death Fox died of cancer in a Fitzroy hospital on 8 October 1915, aged 50. His wife survived him by 36 years, but there were no children.

Gallery of paintings