Europe
In 1901 he was given a commission under the Gilbee bequest to paint a historical picture of The Landing of Captain Cook for the Melbourne gallery. One of the conditions of the bequest was that the picture must be painted overseas and Fox accordingly left for London.
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| Portrait of my Cousin (1894) | |
He explained his decision to base himself in the European art world in a 1903 letter to Frederick McCubbin: "I am quite certain that the only way is to exhibit alongside the best of the work here, and that one man shows, and colonial or Australian exhibitions in London are of very little good." Both the Royal Academy and the Salon were bastions of establishment art, remote from the modernism of Braque, Picasso and the School of Paris, and Fox's biographer, art historian Ruth Zubans, describes the Salon as celebrating elegance and femininity "...filtered through Impressionist experience and academic training". 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).
In 1905 he married Ethel Carrick, an artist of ability. They toured Italy and Spain, then in 1908 settled in Paris, where he was elected an associate of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. He returned to Melbourne on a visit in that year and held a successful one-man show at the Guildhall gallery. Two years later he became a full member of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, the first Australian artist to attain that honour. He was exhibiting regularly at the Royal Academy. In 1912 he was elected a member of the International Society of Painters and in the same year spent some time painting in Spain and Algeria.
Read more about this topic: E. Phillips Fox
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