The fruit market, Nice

British born painter Ethel Carrick studied at London’s Slade School in the late 1890s, before meeting her future husband, expatriate Australian artist Emanuel Phillips Fox in the artist’s colony of St Ives in 1901. After their marriage in 1905 they moved to Paris to live and work, and travelled extensively in Europe and North Africa seeking compelling subject matter and the strong Mediterranean light conducive to painting en plein air.

Carrick’s preference for urban subjects in Paris, French holiday destinations, and North African towns - particularly the life of the streets – was due in part to its exotic appeal to Australian and British audiences, but also for its vibrant and ever changing character, which allowed her to capture the movement of both figures and light, and the passing of time.

After she was widowed in 1916, Ethel adopted Australia as her home but continued to travel widely in search of subjects. From 1925, on return visits to Paris, she made lithographs based on her painting themes. She exhibited lithographs with paintings of French subjects in 1933 in a solo exhibition at the Everyman’s Lending Library on Collins Street in Melbourne, and the following year in an exhibition of work by herself and her late husband, also in Melbourne.

This lithograph captures the light and bustle of the market square in graphic form; while figurative, the artist’s rendering of forms has a rhythmic quality typical of her style. The composition is related to a painting Carrick made about a decade before – The fruit market, Nice c.1923 (Kerry Stokes Collection) with the image taken from the same vantage point, but with different foreground activity, figures and market stalls.