These paired exhibitions do great credit to the National Gallery of Australia’s program promoting the fortunes of women artists in Australia: Know My Name. After the initial selective survey show that included 150 artists, the Gallery is ‘drilling down’ to heavily researched presentations of historical figures. In this case, two women born in the late nineteenth century: Ethel Carrick (1872-1952) and Anne Dangar (1885-1951). Neither were ‘dinkum Aussies’: the oil painter Carrick was born into a prosperous business family in Middlesex and first associated with this country through her husband of ten years, Melbourne portraitist Emanuel Phillips Fox. Dangar, an expatriate from Kempsey, spent the bulk of her professional life as a painter and avant-garde potter in regional France. The two are surely exponents of ‘un-Australian art’ (to use the witty rubric of Rex Butler and A.D.S. Donaldson to defuse stultifying questions of national identity).

A rich array takes up the NGA’s temporary exhibition wing. My focus here is Carrick, 140 of whose colourful landscapes, market paintings, and occasional portraits contrast with the divergent display of pottery, painting, and flat designs for the Cubist Dangar. Years of research have gone into locating the Carricks, many sourced from private collections. The decision was made to focus uniquely on Carrick’s output – with just one very modest Phillips Fox included – so as to escape what NGA curator Dr Deborah Hart sees as the historiographical straitjacket of comparison to the more technically skilled and ambitious husband (Carrick herself promoted this view in many side-by-side exhibitions of the couple’s work after Fox’s death in 1915).

Anne Dangar, Moroccan-style tea set (1940-48), National Gallery of Australia (courtesy of National Gallery of Australia)

A different curatorial strategy is taken by NGA curator Dr Rebecca Edwards in the Dangar retrospective, similarly a first-time comprehensive exhibition of this artist, better known in France than in Australia. The pleasure of this display is its cross-media variety, from Dangar’s early drawings through to her celebrated ceramics in bold and often eccentric shapes. Her glazed designs might be of Cubist, or Celtic, or Moroccan inspiration. There is no taboo against other artists: we see the Cubist ideologue Albert Gleizes, Dangar’s mentor, who often provided designs for her ceramics made at the potteries of his Moly-Sabata artists’ colony; and Dangar alongside her Australian associates Grace Crowley, Thea Proctor, and Dorrit Black. This makes for a more encompassing art history, as well as a more varied and enticing visual spectacle.

Beautifully made and text-rich books ($80) record each show in full. Deep knowledge of Dangar has been available since Bruce Adams’s 1992 Rustic Cubism, whereas Carrick has not been so well served (despite Ruth Zubans’s exemplary 1995 monograph on Phillips Fox). Hart’s long-awaited volume largely fills the gap. Her learned and well-paced 30,000-word essay is supplemented by seven short essays by other scholars (all women). The freshest are by Emma Kindred, who explains Carrick’s important trips to North Africa in 1911 and 1919-20; Rebecca Blake, who parses Carrick’s Sydney-side pictures via the mysteries of Edwardian sea-bathing protocol; and Juliet Peers’s moving study of how, in Australia, the doughty Carrick became a driving force for the association and promotion of women artists.

There are elements of real discovery in this exhibition. Carrick made prints: from architectural etchings like Lionel Lindsay’s, through to late-career lithographs that give us a rare glimpse of Carrick the draughtswoman. These reveal a finesse of linework that does not translate to her rather blotchy, unvarying touch with the paintbrush.

A second revelation is the set of views of Canberra painted during World War II: the arcades of the Melbourne Building in autumn, or a verdant Molonglo Valleylooking towards Old Parliament House before the lake was excavated. Three big pictures reflect Carrick’s own community work in wartime (Cathy Speck addresses this topic in her specialist essay). Her multi-figure paintings of women volunteers in busy halls, packing clothes for soldiers overseas or moulding papier mâché, are paintings of great spirit and fortitude.

Carrick’s life-long affiliation with the Theosophical Society in Paris and Sydney is presented by Jenny McFarlane. You cannot make a convincing argument for the impact of this intellectual realm on Carrick’s visual approach. She never engaged pictorially with Annie Bessant and Charles Webster Leadbeater’s peculiar Thought Forms of 1905; nor did she attempt anything like the abstraction of Theosophists Hilma af Klint, Wassily Kandinsky, or Piet Mondrian. Carrick remained, on the evidence, tied to a system of visual representation that was profoundly mimetic, even if she thought her scenes of human interaction had a spiritual dimension.

I have issues with the Carrick hang itself: a dense panoply of many dozens of small canvases along the sightlines. Most are oil sketches the size of a laptop in gilt frames. The rows are punctuated with a dozen works twice this size. This is Carrick at her most impressive: we see the iconic 1913 Bathers at Manly Beach, The fruit market, Nice (1933), and, in a rare case, Carrick scaling up one motif from an oil sketch to a more detailed ‘tableau’ (High Tide at St. Malo).

So many pictures on similar subjects seem unjustified: flower markets at Nice were an enticing prospect for the colourist, but why display up to a dozen of them? It is not a series in the Monet sense: there is no systematic study of light or the temporal effet across similar scenes. Indeed, the exhibition reveals the sameness of Carrick’s practice over a fifty-year career. Eighty well-selected pictures would have served her reputation better.

Why did Carrick remain in this comfortable pictorial vein, established around 1906 when she first began exhibiting in Paris? First, the works sold well. We have a letter from Manny Fox expressing pride yet consternation at her performance in the Salon d’Automne. Carrick was perhaps content to leave large-scale pictures to Fox. She was technically more progressive than the meticulous Fox, but the claims made for Carrick exceed the result. At the 1908 Salon d’Automne, she would have been one of the legion of middle-of-the-road artists painting in an agreeable but hardly experimental ‘late Impressionist’ style, such as Georgette Agutte or Georges d’Espagnat. The young Raoul Dufy painted Impressionist beach scenes at Fécamp in 1904-5 that were comparable in every way to Carrick’s, but within a few years he had modified his approach to full-blown ‘Fauvism’ in emulation of the Matisse push.

Thus I would dispute that Carrick was a ‘post-Impressionist’, as the NGA claims: her beautifully-composed scenes never deviate from single-point perspective, the ubiquity of which had been challenged by Cézanne. Neither does she go beyond the Impressionist concept of local colour, nor launch into non-mimetic colour like Paul Gauguin or the Fauves. She was a Late Impressionist artist-traveller of real distinction, with a gift for summarising complex scenes. She used her acute skills as an observer of daily life, be it to represent bourgeois leisure in the Luxembourg Gardens of Paris, women washing clothes in the Wadi at Bou-Saada, or pilgrims on the staircases of Benares. These are solid, satisfying, and occasionally lyrical paintings that, with a few wartime exceptions, convey the good side of life in a century of troubles.

Ethel Carrick and Anne Dangar continue at the National Gallery of Australia until 25 April 2025.