E. Phillips Fox

Emanuel Phillips Fox (12 March 1865 – 8 October 1915) was an Australian impressionist painter.

Born and raised in Melbourne, Victoria, Fox studied at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School. He travelled to Paris to study in 1886 and remained in Europe until 1892, when he returned to Melbourne and led what is considered the second phase of the Heidelberg School, an impressionist art movement which had developed in the city during his absence. He spent over a decade in Europe in the early 20th century before finally settling in Melbourne, where he died.

Fox's wife Ethel Carrick was also a noted impressionist painter.

Emanuel Phillips Fox was born on 12 March 1865 to the photographer Alexander Fox and Rosetta Phillips at 12 Victoria Parade in Fitzroy, Melbourne, into a family of lawyers whose firm, DLA Piper still exists. He studied art at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in Melbourne from 1878 until 1886 under George Folingsby; his fellow students included John Longstaff, Frederick McCubbin, and David Davies, who like him, joined the bohemian Buonarotti Club, and Rupert Bunny.

In 1886, he travelled to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Julian under William-Adolphe Bouguereau, where he gained first prize in his year for design, and École des Beaux-Arts (1887–1890), where his masters included Jean-Léon Gérôme, who with Bouguereau was among the most famous artists of the time. While at the Beaux Arts, he was awarded a first prize for painting. He was greatly influenced by the fashionable school of en plein air Impressionism. He exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1890, and returned to Melbourne the same year.

Fox had a considerable influence as a teacher on Australian art. In October 1892, Fox opened the Melbourne School of Art with Tudor St. George Tucker, which ran until 1899, and in which the two artists taught Impressionism in the manner of the French schools in which both had studied, and with more liberal methods than the academy-style instruction of the National Gallery of Victoria art schools. A summer school was offered at Charterisville that Fox and Tucker had established in the old mansion above the Yarra River in East Ivanhoe, the lease of which they had taken over from Walter Withers in 1893. It was Australia's first recognised summer school of art. Its women students, including Ina Gregory, Mary Meyer, Bertha Merfield, Henrietta Irving, Ursula Foster and Helen Peters were accommodated in rooms of the stone house and a chaperon and housekeeper looked after them. Violet Teague may have been their tutor. His student Mary Meyer was the subject Fox's portrait of her at age twenty, in the course of which Fox made a finished charcoal drawing. His Whistleresque Portrait of Mary, Daughter of Professor Nanson was exhibited in 1898 at an exhibition of Australian Art in London, at the Grafton Galleries, and is now held in the National Gallery of Victoria. Her husband, Felix Meyer, was Fox's patron. Another student, Ursula Foster, was the model for his model for Fox's Lady in Black and A Love Story.

In his brief career with the Heidelberg School, Fox was noted for his figure compositions and subdued landscapes, often painted as nocturnes, utilising a low-key palette in which the colours, although limited in range, were related to each other "with the utmost delicacy and inventiveness," to quote Australian artist and art scholar James Gleeson. The emphasis on landscapes may have been at least partly a response to market demand – landscapes found more ready acceptance, and Art Students, a figurative genre painting now recognised as one of his best, first exhibited at the Victorian Artists Society in 1895, remained unsold until 1943.

In 1901, he was given a commission under the Gilbee bequest to paint a historical picture of The Landing of Captain Cook for the Melbourne gallery. One of the conditions of the bequest was that the picture must be painted overseas and Fox accordingly left for London.