Two French scenes by much-travelled husband-and-wife artists Ethel Carrick (1872-1952) and Emanuel Phillips Fox (1865-1915) are highlights of Sotheby’s sale of Australian Art to be held in Sydney on August 27.

Extracted from Antiques Trade Gazette | Anne Crane

Ethel Carrick was born in England and trained at the Slade. She met her future husband, Emanuel Phillips Fox (born in Melbourne, Australia) when they were both part of the plein air painting colony in St Ives, Cornwall.

They married in 1905 and moved to Paris for several years where both were influenced by the contemporary art movements before going to Australia, where Emanuel died in 1915 aged just 50.

Emanuel’s oil on canvas was painted in 1889 on one of his first tours of rural France and shows an Impressionist-influenced landscape in Brittany between Morbihan and Finistère. It will have an estimate of Aus$500,000-700,000 in the Sotheby’s sale.

Market scene

The oil by Ethel (Carrick Fox) is a depiction of a Parisian market scene, one of her favourite subjects, and was painted in 1919. When this last came under the hammer in the same rooms in April 2008 it realised Aus$840,000 or Aus$1,008,000 including premium, the highest auction price for a single canvas by an Australian female artist.

This time around it carries a guide of Aus$1.2m-1.6m.