Australian galleries have a long love affair with impressionism and post-impressionism. At the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) alone, roughly half of its annual Winter Masterpieces exhibitions over the last decade or so have featured impressionists and post-impressionists—from Pierre Bonnard, Edgar Degas, and Claude Monet to Vincent van Gogh. Not to mention the French Impressionism exhibition, which is returning to the NGV for the 2025 season after closing early in 2021 due to pandemic restrictions. The National Gallery of Australia (NGA) just finished a controversial deep dive into Paul Gauguin’s work and legacy, and in May will launch Cézanne to Giacometti. In between these heavyweights of post-impressionism, they have Ethel Carrick.

Ethel Carrick is part of the NGA’s Know My Name initiative, a project that aims to shed light on the women artists who so often get left out of the canonical narrative of art history. Carrick (1872–1952), an English artist who painted and exhibited widely throughout her life, is often considered in the shadow of her husband, Australian impressionist Emanuel Phillips Fox. This is despite his career being drastically shorter than hers, due to his untimely passing in 1915. He was her introduction to Australia, where she exhibited widely, splitting time between here and Paris and travelling extensively in between.

The spectrum of Carrick’s career is broad, spanning almost fifty years, multiple continents, and a progression of styles. She began as an impressionist plein air painter before adopting a more distinctive post-impressionist style, with forays into fauvism as well. “Ethel Carrick was on the cusp of impressionism,” says Dr Deborah Hart, head curator at the NGA. “I think one of the most interesting things is that she actually introduced a post-impressionist way of working to Australia. In the exhibition we have one of the very first post-impressionist works to be created and exhibited in Australia.”

And yet, this is the first Ethel Carrick retrospective shown in Australia since 1979, despite her work existing in many collections here. Like so many other women who, as the Know My Name project declares, ‘have been shaping culture for time immemorial’, her place in history was largely forgotten. Despite exhibiting at the Salon d’Automne in Paris alongside Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, much of her work has been lying dormant in private collections.

“It’s striking that Carrick’s work seems almost devoid of this gaze. Is it because women move through the world differently? Or perhaps just that she seems to position herself within a scene, part of the crowd rather than its overseer.”

“This current retrospective is an opportunity to document her work more fully and show the breadth and depth of her artistic career,” says Hart. “A lot of works either have never been seen in this country or haven’t been seen for many years.” So, what—now that we are given the opportunity to fully re-examine Carrick’s oeuvre and consider its place in the canon—can be revealed?

Carrick spent much of her life travelling, documenting all her destinations in paint. The retrospective will include her works made throughout travels in Europe, India and North Africa, and she also spent time in the South Pacific. There has been a lot of discourse in recent years about the fetishising gaze of artists from this period on the cultures they depict in their travels—Gauguin is a notable example. It’s striking that Carrick’s work seems almost devoid of this gaze. Is it because women move through the world differently? Or perhaps just that she seems to position herself within a scene, part of the crowd rather than its overseer.

“She was quite radical for her time, in the way that she painted the public domain out of doors. Obviously, people had been painting landscapes and portraits, but she was interested in crowds of people,” says Hart. “She would go and set up in the Luxembourg Gardens, or when she came to Australia in the Sydney Botanic Gardens, often on these little wooden panels and paint these expressive scenes of crowds in flux. It was something that she really loved and felt was part of what made her vision distinctive.”

Carrick herself said, “It’s people who attract me. Crowds are to me what a magnet is to a needle. I love the colour, life, movement, and individuality of a crowd.” There could be a level of voyeurism to her penchant for bustling market scenes, parks, and gardens, but with a lack of objectification, works like A market in Kairouan and Untitled (North African Marketplace) (both circa 1911) feel more like a celebration than anything else. Hart agrees, “What I find when I look at them together, is that they’re all done in a very respectful way. She’s interested in just showing the everyday life of people in these places, without judgement or inference.”

Carrick would often exhibit her paintings outside the country she painted them in, showing her Parisian paintings in Australia and bringing her Melbourne parks and Sydney beaches to the European salons. Hart describes it as a “kind of cross-continental sharing of works in different contexts”. Australian audiences obviously already have a taste for European vistas, but perhaps what will stick out here are the more familiar locations—Manly Beach, Summer is Here (1913)—shown together, they create a rich tapestry of a life well-travelled.

Ethel Carrick
National Gallery of Australia
On now—27 April

This article was originally published in the January/February 2025 print issue of Art Guide Australia.