When Ethel Carrick Fox and E Phillips Fox travelled to Algeria and Morocco in 1911, they went to explore the compositional and tonal possibilities afforded by the brilliant North African landscape. After a Parisian summer that had provided insufficient stimulus for Fox, he and his wife left for the Orient, ‘determined to get some settled sunlight’.1 The countries through which they travelled were a particularly apt choice for painters experimenting with light, colour and form; together with Tunisia, they comprised a region known as the Maghreb, so named in Arabic after the setting sun. It was the unique qualities of the sun that posed both a temptation and a challenge to Western artists. As Eugène Fromentin discovered when painting in Algeria in the 1850s, the North African light ‘inverts everything, it reverses the harmonies which have organized landscape for centuries’.2
The success of Eugène Delacroix’s 1832 journey through Algeria and Morocco — and the celebrity of his evocative paintings — had given rise to an artists’ circuit through French North Africa that was popular with European painters. In journeying there, Carrick and Fox followed in the footsteps of the most influential of these painters, Jean-Léon Gérôme, who was Fox’s master at the École des Beaux-Arts. Gérôme was fascinated by the Orient and had been to North Africa and the Middle East on some 11 occasions, painting images that did much to fuel the European imagination for the exotic East. ‘My short stay in Constantinople had whetted my appetite’, he wrote after his first visit there, ‘and the Orient was the most frequent of my dreams’.3
Though lured there by the European dream of the East, in the Maghreb, the Foxes were focused more on observation than imagination. Accompanied by Fox’s pupil Herbert Daley, they landed at Algiers and, from there, made their way south to Bou-Saâda — a bustling market town popular with European painters and home to Etienne Dinet. They stayed six weeks before returning to Algiers, stopping for several days at a number of locations along the way. From Algiers they travelled to the Moroccan port of Tangier, before returning to Paris via Spain. They were well prepared for the expedition — Fox having designed a bespoke box for their painting materials — and the trip was a success. ‘We both did lots of work’, Fox wrote to Hans Heysen, ‘and I think Igot some quite good ones . . . painted at one go’.4 Carrick,too, found the trip ‘well worth while’; she remembered the experience some years later in the pages of Adelaide’s Register as ‘hard work . . . though the light is lovely. Painting all day in the heat and blinding sand . . . And the smell of it!5
Although Carrick’s recollection betrays her unfamiliarity with the environment, by 1911 the Algerian landscape was an image popular with European audiences and the subject of myriad works of art and literature. The English artist and writer Barbara Bodichon even went so far as to recommend Algeria as a suitable second home in her text Algeria Considered as a Winter Residence for the English.6 The Orient was a beacon to many artist–travellers whose motives are well understood. However, the pathways of the ‘lovers’ journey’ have been less travelled in studies of Orientalism. Wassily Kandinsky ventured to North Africa with his new lover Gabriele Münter in 1904 (perhaps preferring the desert heat to the anger of a jilted wife), but few husband–wife artistic expeditions are documented.
To the artistic partnership of Carrick and Fox, a journey through the Maghreb offered an opportunity to paint en plein air in a new environment, experimenting with style, colour and brushwork. They eschewed the wilder subjects of the European Orientalist imagination — harems and odalisques — and painted what they observed in public spaces: streets, mosques, markets, town life and landscapes. This focus was partly dictated by the brevity of their trip and their status as cultural outsiders. Private domestic spaces suchas the harem would have been inaccessible to artist–travellers such as the Foxes — as, too, they were to Delacroix and Gérôme, whose libidinous harem paintings were primarily constructed using French models in Parisian studios furnished by the artists’ imaginations.7
Nevertheless, the Foxes’ observations were selective, and a latent, romanticised vision of the Orient is revealed by what they did not picture: the new railroads that crisscrossed the region, the steamships that sailed into Algiers, and the modern comforts of the hotels in which they stayed. The trip marked an important developmental stage in the oeuvres of both artists. Fox ventured beyond his usual intimiste and dejeuner subjects to embrace a more vibrant, rhythmical style free from the lingering academicism of his formal training. This was partly the result of the exigencies of painting while travelling, but it allowed him the opportunity to experiment with sunlight and form and to focus on the observation of natural effects. In his Moslems in procession 1911, individual figures are reduced to simple shapes, but a pictorial harmony is created through careful compositional balance. The procession that disappears into the mid-ground is matched by the chiastic diagonal of the trees behind it, the two elements strengthened by a colour palette that carefully pits a cool foreground against an intense middle.
In works such as The kasbah, Tangiers 1911, Fox demonstrates a marked shift in technique that hints at geometric forms, and features a high-contrast colour palette absent from his earlier impressionistic landscapes. Carrick’s Orientalist works similarly demonstrate a distinct pictorial rhythm. In Arab women washing clothes in a stream 1911, her compositional experimentation stretches further than Fox’s. Here, the short, vivid brushstrokes Carrick uses to describe the play of sunlight on the rocky hillside, the refracted splashes of light off the water and the colourful costumes of her subjects generate an optical effect bordering on abstraction. This experimentation was notedwhen the painting was exhibited in Australia in 1913. The Sydney Morning Herald described it as ‘daringly modern’ and registered surprise at:
. . . the swift, impetuous strokes of paint . . . only to find that, viewed a few feet away, the apparent chaos resolved itself into . . . a bacchanalia of glowing chromatics and rhythmical sweeping lines.8
It is this modernist play of colour and form — rather than simply its exotic imagery — that is of chief interest in Carrick’s The mosque at Tangier 1911. The subject of the painting is the tomb of the marabout Sidi Berraisoul on the rue Ben Abbou, which Henri Matisse later used as thefocal point of his Le marabout 1912–13.9 The Argus described Carrick’s work in 1913 as ‘suggesting all the charm of Eastern atmosphere’, though the predominant yellow hue was felt, rather than seen, by Carrick. The subtle adjustment in tone between the building on the right and its shadow, and the variation of texture between the main figure and the foreground, reveal how Carrick used the unfamiliar shapes and sunlight of the Maghreb as a catalyst for technical experimentation.
In 1913, Carrick and Fox exhibited their Orientalist paintings at the Société des Peintres Orientalistes Français in Paris. Carrick had already exhibited some of these works at the Salon d’Automne in 1911 and 1912 to acclaim, with one critic describing her work as ‘extremely seductive’.10 Though their choice of subject matter was influenced by the French taste for the exotic, the Foxes’ paintings lack the familiar sensual motifs of much European Orientalist imagery. What critics in both France and Australia responded to were the experimental colours and forms — elements inspired by a sunlit landscape that was uniquely North African.
While it is difficult to assess the influence of this brief trip on the Foxes’ later careers, the unique challenge of desert painting en plein air provided a chromatic point of comparison that considerably influenced their techniques. Carrick’s subsequent experience of the Australian landscape was certainly informed by her African journey; in 1925, she recorded that ‘the light in Australia reminds me of North Africa more than any other country I [have] ever been in’.11 To Ethel Carrick and E Phillips Fox, the Maghreb was a land whose light inspired new ways of seeing.
Endnotes
1 Letter from E Phillips Fox to Hans Heysen, Hans Heysen Papers, National Library of Australia, MS 5073/1/319A. Reprinted in Ruth Zubans, E Phillips Fox: His Life and Art, Miegunyah Press, Carlton, Victoria, 1995,pp.181–2.
2 Eugène Fromentin in 1859, quoted in Elisabeth Cardone (ed.), Une Anée dans le Sahel, Flammarion, Paris, 1991, pp.184–5; quoted by RogerBenjamin, ‘The oriental mirage’, in Roger Benjamin (ed.), Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee [exhibition catalogue], Art Gallery of New South Wales,Sydney, 1997, p.13.
3 Quoted by Gerald M Ackerman, The Life and Work of Jean-Léon Gérôme, Sotheby’s Publications, London and New York, 1986, p.44.
4 Letter from Fox to Heysen.
5 ‘Life and pictures: Mrs Phillips Fox and her art’, Register [Adelaide],14 July 1925, p.4.
6 Barbara Bodichon, ‘Algeria considered as a winter residence for theEnglish’, English Woman’s Journal, London, 1858.
7 Interestingly, some female artists and writers, such as the painter Henriette Brown, were invited into harems (where non-related men were forbidden) and described their experiences. Their texts expose the fabrication of typical European odalisque paintings by recording the harem as a domestic family space in which familial and social politics were played out. See Mary Roberts, Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature, Duke University Press, Durham, 2007.
8 ‘Pictures for the home: Mrs Phillips Fox’s exhibition’, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 November 1913, p.7.
9 Ursula Prunster, ‘From empire’s end: Australians as Orientalists, 1880–1920’, in Benjamin, p.49.
10 ‘Les mois artistique: Le salon d’automne’, L’Art et Les Artistes, vol.14,October 1911 – March 1912, p.87.11 Register [Adelaide], p.4.
11 “Mrs. E. P. Fox’s Paintings: Sane and Sound Impressionism”, Argus, 11 July, 1913, 5.
Publication: Angela Goddard et al, Art, Love and Life: Ethel Carrick and E Phillips Fox, Queensland Art Gallery, 2011