Nasturtiums (E. Phillips Fox)
Nasturtiums is an oil painting by the Australian Impressionist painter Emanuel Phillips Fox painted in 1912 during a period of great creativity for the artist in which he produced some of his finest works. It shows a woman, Edith Susan Gerard Anderson, wearing a printed mauve dress, black hat and black gloves, reading in a garden seated in a cane chair against a background of climbing nasturtium leaves and flowers growing up a trellis. After being owned by the model's family, the Boyds, since its creation, the painting was purchased in 2011 at auction by the Society of the Art Gallery of New South Wales as a memorial to Margaret Olley, a Sydney painter and longtime patron of the gallery who had died a few months earlier. Fox was one of Olley's favourite artists and the museum's curator of Australian art said the painting's "combination of the poetic and the pragmatic, the decorative and the real", reflected Olley's own aesthetic preoccupations". Artist Emanuel Phillips Fox was an Australian painter living in Paris at the time that he produced this and several other paintings that depict the artist's wife and friends in the context of Parisian domesticity during the Belle Époque. Fox had married the Australian artist Ethel Carrick in 1905 in London in a ceremony attended by Rupert Bunny, another expatriate Australian artist and friend. The couples lived near to one another in Paris, and the friendship between the artists is regarded as having "beneficial influences" on one another's art. Model The model in the painting is Fox's friend Edith Susan Gerard Anderson (1878–1961), who was also the model for other paintings by Fox, including On the Balcony, (Fr: Sur le Balcon) and The Green Parasol painted in the same year (1912). Born in Brisbane, Anderson had studied under Fox. Her red hair is notable in many of Fox's paintings. Anderson and her future husband, Penleigh Boyd, were close friends of the artist who "was attracted by her rich auburn hair and grey-green eyes—both fashionable at the time." Fox introduced Anderson to Boyd, who had an adjoining studio in Paris. The two married in October 1912. Their son, Robin Boyd, became one of Australia's best known architects and their nephew, Arthur Boyd, one of Australia's best known painters. The Boyd family owned the painting until its acquisition by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Given these dates, the creation of Nasturtiums and On the Balcony has been estimated as early September 1912. One critic described paintings such as Nasturtiums and On the Balcony as "full of tender sympathy for the model". Subject Nasturtiums is one of a series of paintings of women in gardens that Fox created in 1911–12. Many were painted in-situ in the small central courtyard garden of the Fox studio-apartment on Boulevard Arago in Montparnasse. Although the subject is known and recognisable from other works, the painting's title and the period in which it was painted show that it is an example of how "the borderline