It was in the historic Luxembourg Gardens of cosmopolitan Paris where painter Ethel Carrick painted some of her most defining works.

Her many lively impressions captured the French capital in the age of the Belle Époque period from 1905 to 1913: aproned nannies with their young charges and fashionable hatted women in bustles and parasols strolling the lawns and tree-lined promenades of Paris.

“Home was an apartment on the Boulevard Arago, and she would come here with her little boards and easel and create her bold, painterly impressions,” recounts Deborah Hart, head curator of Australian art at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA).

“It was still quite a radical prospect for a woman to use the public domain openly as a studio and subject. And, you know, the gardens are set in this amazing architectural landscaped environment with the Senate in the background, but Ethel takes a view a little off kilter.

“What she was genuinely interested in were people; she loved the sense of the everyday. Crowds, she once said, drew her like a magnet to a needle. She loves their colour, their movement and their vibrancy.”

Hart has come to the Paris gardens in the footsteps of Carrick, a pioneering post-impressionist painter who she believes deserves to become a household name in Australia and France, between which she divided her time and inspiration.

Steel-grey skies and leafless trees signal the imminent arrival of winter, in stark contrast to Carrick’s summery and vibrant compositions for which she is best known.

This Saturday, the NGA opens its first major show of Carrick’s work in almost 50 years, the most comprehensive retrospective staged, bringing together some 135 works drawn from public and private collections.

NGA director Nick Mitzevich predicts the Carrick show, double-billed with potter Anne Dangar, will be the gallery’s surprise summer hit.

Carrick was, notes Hart, “one of our truly transnational art figures”.

On long visits to Australia, Carrick introduced local audiences to painted scenes from provincial flower markets, gardens and the candy-striped beach tents of the French seaside, and took quintessential paintings of Australia back to Paris for exhibition.

Many of her French market scenes, a favourite subject of her artistic practice, are tightly held by private collectors. The exhibition includes Carrick’s The Market (1919), a painting remarkable for its mastery of dappled light and depth and richness of colour.

It was sold at auction for $1.46 million five years ago and remains the second-highest selling work by an Australian female artist. Two other works have since topped the $1 million mark, a fact Hart says would have astonished Carrick had she still been alive.

The Archives of Women Artists Research and Exhibitions (AWARE) runs a global database of notable women artists of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, with links to France.

A mere 17 Australian artists are represented with fully researched searchable biographies. Carrick is not one of them.

AWARE’s director, Camille Morineau, says Carrick is representative of a generation of women locked out of the arts-world narrative on the international stage.

“We have forgotten that in the late 19th century and between the wars women were considered the equal of men, and then it changed drastically. It’s actually the 20th century that has forgotten that, or chosen to forget that, and it’s a narrative that has been most difficult to change.

“There was a big moment between the 1930s and 1950s when big museums established, when art critics, art historians became strong, and it’s all men, like Clement Greenberg in the United States, who establishes a male history written by males about males.

“We inherit that thinking, and Ethel Carrick is a good example of that.”

Carrick was born in Uxbridge, in west London, in 1872, and enrolled in the Slade School of Art just as gender strictures were loosening in London and Paris, and the suffragette movement was in full swing.

She met the Australian painter Emanuel Phillips Fox on a sketching trip to St Ives, Cornwall, their 1905 marriage in Ealing witnessed by a who’s who of eminent Australian artists: best man George Lambert, as well as Arthur Streeton, Rupert Bunny and Tom Roberts.

The newlyweds arrived in Paris the same year as Henri Matisse and the Fauves exploded onto the art scene.

“There were artists in Paris from all over the world, and, for her, it was metaphorically as if a window had been flung open in which she could develop her distinctive artistic vision,” Hart notes.

The couple often worked side by side, especially during their travels. Fox’s works were informed by a more academic approach to Impressionism than Carrick’s, and tended to be larger in scale, says Hart. He was also a fine, conventional portraitist, commissioned to paint Australian Prime Minister Andrew Fisher in 1913.

Carrick’s paintings were more experimental and adventurous, with expressive brushstrokes evoking mood and atmosphere, and not always to Fox’s taste.

From the time they were married she mostly continued to exhibit under her maiden name as Ethel Carrick, sometimes with “Mrs Phillips Fox” in brackets, asserting her artistic independence.

Her fascination with the hustle and bustle of crowds found expression in one of her earliest works, Esquisse en Australie (Sketch in Australia), painted in 1908 on the couple’s first visit to Australia when Fox introduced his bride to his Melbourne family.

The scene from Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden set the “cat among the pigeons” when it was exhibited in Melbourne that same year, says Hart.

“It was one of the first truly post-impressionist works to have been created and exhibited in Australia,” Hart says. “The expressively painted apple-green, sunlit grass set against deep blue shadows and the spill of shadows appeared distinctly modern to local audiences.”

Carrick took the painting back to Paris, where it was shown with three other paintings in the 1908 Salon d’Automne, the annual exhibition which presaged major artistic trends of the 20th century.

All four will be reunited for the exhibition, Ethel Carrick, for the first time in 100 years.

The summer of 1913 was another pivotal moment in the artistic career of Carrick, notes fellow NGA curator, Rebecca Blake.

It was still quite a radical prospect for a woman to use the public domain openly as a studio and subject.

Deborah Hart, NGA

That season she moved to the beach suburbs of Cremorne and Manly, driven by a desire to paint and experience the liberated lifestyle of the Australian surfer girl.

Out of that came one of Carrick’s most significant works, Christmas Day on Manly Beach, (1913), a lively tableau of loose-limbed bathers frolicking on one of the first Australian beaches to permit day bathing.

“One can imagine how utterly different the scene at the beach of a communal celebration under the summer sun would have seemed to Carrick, who grew up with cold, winter Christmases,” Hart says.

Loading

“Carrick was drawn to the idea of the modern ‘surfer girl’ as an expression of women’s liberation, at a time when her confidence in her own modern ideas had been given a great boost after her highly successful exhibition in the same year this work was painted.”

The preliminary painterly sketches for the finished work were undertaken in the company of her friend, Thea Proctor. Look closely, says Hart, and the two women wearing colourful kimonos may depict Carrick and Proctor enjoying the liberated atmosphere of a burgeoning beach culture.

This painting was included in a joint exhibition with Fox at Melbourne’s Athenaeum Gallery in 1914, where it was widely considered Carrick’s best. Much later it received a special award, a diplome d’honneur, at the 1927 International Exhibition in Bordeaux.

After its European tour and many years after Fox’s sudden death from cancer, Carrick brought Christmas Day back to Australia with her and loaned it to the Manly Art Gallery and Museum, where it was later acquired. It’s an exhibition highlight.

Fox’s passing after 10 years of marriage devastated Carrick, left her almost suicidal and encouraged her beliefs in theosophy and spirituality, which gained traction after the carnage of World War I.

Loading

“She spent the rest of her life promoting Emanuel’s art because she genuinely felt he was an important artist and wanted him to be well recognised in his home country,” Hart says.

“In her advancing years she was finding it difficult to make ends meet and there was a practical, financial dimension to the sale of Emanuel’s works. She continued to create her own art and one of her Nice flower market paintings was acquired by the French State from her solo exhibition in Paris in 1928, but not a lot sold.”

Carrick was not the difficult and lonely widow, as several accounts suggest, says art historian Juliette Peers. Indefatigable and popular, Carrick energetically supported the war effort and the plight of refugees, was an active member of the Theosophic Society and other female artist groups, and was a long-time friend of Dame Mary Gilmore and Proctor.

She also was an intrepid traveller, touring to Italy, Spain, Tunisia, and in her late 60s to India. Late in life, in 1949, Carrick took out Australian citizenship.

“From the time she first came to this country in 1908 and then in 1913, she developed a private collector base and the majority of her solo exhibitions were held in this country,” Hart says. “It was also her connection with Emanuel’s home country, and she had many friends here, including theosophical bonds. She made many visits, and stayed for just over a decade from the outbreak of the Second World War until 1950. This was the longest period that she was here, and perhaps this experience encouraged her to think about formalising her deep connection.”

Carrick died in 1952 in Melbourne, still with the hope of one day returning to France and her apartment in Montparnasse. Her death certificate noted her occupation as “home duties”.

Ethel Carrick is at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra until April 27. The writer travelled to Paris with the assistance of the NGA.

To read more from Spectrum, visit our page here.