Return To Australia
In 1913 he returned to Australia, marking the occasion with an exhibition of some seventy works. 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.
A final aspect of Fox's oeuvre worth noting are his official commissions. The Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, the most important of these works, holds more than a hint of his teacher Gérôme; and every Australian might be surprised to find that Fox made a copy of Nathaniel Dance's Portrait of Captain Cook, an icon probably so ubiquitous as to have sunk unnoticed but ever-present into the national psyche.
Fox died of cancer in a Fitzroy hospital on 8 October 1915. His wife survived him by 36 years, but there were no children. His nephew Leonard Phillips Fox was a prolific writer and pamphleteer for Communist and humanitarian causes.
Read more about this topic: E. Phillips Fox
Famous quotes containing the words return to, return and/or australia:
“At twelve, the disintegration of afternoon
Began, the return to phantomerei, if not
To phantoms. Till then, it had been the other way:
One imagined the violet trees but the trees stood green,
At twelve, as green as ever they would be.
The sky was blue beyond the vaultiest phrase.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“It is very considerably smaller than Australia and British Somaliland put together. As things stand at present there is nothing much the Texans can do about this, and ... they are inclined to shy away from the subject in ordinary conversation, muttering defensively about the size of oranges.”
—Alex Atkinson, British humor writer. repr. In Present Laughter, ed. Alan Coren (1982)