Ethel Carrick

Carrick produced sunlit scenes of markets, beaches, and public gardens along with floral still lifes throughout her career, treating outdoor urban and colonial life as her central subject. Born 7 February 1872 in Uxbridge, Middlesex, England, she studied at the Guildhall School of Music, London, received drawing instruction from Francis Bate, and later trained at the Slade School of Fine Art, London; exact enrollment dates and instructors are not confirmed in the sources reviewed here.

She married the Australian painter Emanuel Phillips Fox; the exact date of the marriage is not confirmed in the sources reviewed here. Carrick exhibited in Paris, including at the Salon d'Automne, though the specific years of her Paris exhibiting activity and any formal offices she may have held there are not confirmed in the sources reviewed. She traveled widely, including to North Africa, and exhibited extensively in Melbourne and Sydney from 1908 through the 1930s and 1940s, with solo shows at Bernard's Gallery, Melbourne (1908), The Guildhall, Melbourne, and Anthony Hordern's Fine Art Gallery, Sydney (both 1913), and Galerie de la Palette Francaise, Paris (1928). In 1928 she won the diplome d'honneur at the International Exhibition of Bordeaux for Christmas Day on Manly Beach (1913).

Carrick continued to exhibit into her later years, including a solo show at Melbourne's Book Club Gallery in 1949. She died on 17 June 1952 in Kew, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, at the age of 80. Material tied to the National Gallery of Australia's retrospective programming describes her final illness as a cerebral hemorrhage, though that detail rests on a single account and has not been independently corroborated in the record reviewed here.

From early in her career, critics placed Carrick within the advanced wing of contemporary painting, exhibiting under her maiden name of Miss Carrick even as she also showed publicly as Mrs E Phillips Fox. Institutional attention followed across the twentieth century: her work was included in the Museum of Modern Art's 1941 survey Art of Australia 1788 to 1941, and a touring retrospective organized by the Geelong Art Gallery reached the SH Ervin Gallery in Sydney and the University Art Museum in Brisbane in 1979. Reassessment accelerated in the 2020s. The National Gallery of Australia's 2024 to 2025 retrospective, paired with a survey of Anne Dangar and framed within the gallery's Know My Name initiative for women artists, presented more than 100 works and traveled on to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2025 to 2026. Coverage of her market, including a Sydney Morning Herald feature on an artist who "died a housewife" and later broke auction records, has framed her as a case study in the market's slow recognition of historic women painters.

Carrick's auction market is small in volume but has grown sharply on the strength of a handful of major paintings. Press coverage puts her auction record at approximately AUD 1,464,000 (about USD 995,000) for The Market (1919), sold at Sotheby's around 2019, though the exact sale date and saleroom location are not consistently reported across sources. A separate painting, Market, Under Trees, sold for AUD 1,008,000 at Sotheby's Sydney in April 2008, itself a large jump from the AUD 266,500 it brought at a 1999 Sotheby's sale. Her market has also been complicated at times by historical attribution confusion with her husband, Emanuel Phillips Fox; in 2026 a Paris scene long credited to Fox was reattributed to Carrick on the basis of signature evidence and resold through Sotheby's, according to the Australian Financial Review.

Carrick's market rests on a small number of exceptional canvases rather than deep, liquid trading, so individual results, especially for exhibition-history works, can move the record price sharply from one sale to the next. No catalogue raisonne has been confirmed, and no gallery or estate is currently documented as her formal representative, which places extra weight on provenance and exhibition history, particularly given the documented historical confusion between her signature and that of her husband, Emanuel Phillips Fox. The recent National Gallery of Australia and Art Gallery of New South Wales retrospectives are the strongest current signal of institutional demand, and collectors should expect continuing scholarship, and potentially further price movement, as museums keep reassessing her work.