Emanuel Phillips Fox (b. 1865-1915) was born in Fitzroy on Wurindjeri Country in Naarm (Melbourne). He was an artist and an art teacher – teaching at a number of suburban design schools while painting landscapes around Melbourne and in Gippsland¹. In 1887 he travelled to Pairs for further study, settling in St Ives in Cornwall which was one of the key centres of plein air (outside) painting in England. He returned to Naarm in 1892, and in 1893 he established the Melbourne School of Art with fellow painted Albert Tucker². In Australia and Europe Fox painted landscapes, genre scenes and portraits – his signature Impressionist technique, composing animated scenes of everyday life that focussed on absorbing the play of light, atmosphere and vivid colour around him.

Phillips Fox From Charterisville depicts an elevated view artists home estate on Wurundjeri Country, looking out over a growing Naarm (Melbourne) city and the Yarra Valley. Fox’s vibrant and rhythmical style, broken brushwork, and palette of cool tonal blues and greens, capture an atmospheric rendition of place in the early evening light. His artistic vision of harmony and security is signified by the lush green grassland in foreground that is interrupted by an impression of a white picket fence that follows the downhill slope from right to left. Fox’s estate extended well beyond this point though, his farmhouses, cottages, extensive gardens and orchards extending outspreading down the hillside and toward the edge of the River that acted as a boundary point.

1. Art Gallery new South Wales, “E Phillips Fox,” accessed February 2, 2021, https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/artists/fox-e-phillips/.
2. Australian Dictionary of Biography, “Fox, Emanuel Phillips (1865-1915),” accessed February , 2021, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/fox-emanuel-phillips-6228.