Nasturtiums (E. Phillips Fox)
Nasturtiums is an oil painting by the Australian Impressionist painter Emanuel Phillips Fox painted in 1912 during a period of great creativity for the artist in which he produced some of his finest works. It shows a woman, Edith Susan Gerard Anderson, wearing a printed mauve dress, black hat and black gloves, reading in a garden seated in a cane chair against a background of climbing nasturtium leaves and flowers growing up a trellis. After being owned by the model's family, the Boyds, since its creation, the painting was purchased in 2011 at auction by the Society of the Art Gallery of New South Wales as a memorial to Margaret Olley, a Sydney painter and longtime patron of the gallery who had died a few months earlier. Fox was one of Olley's favourite artists and the museum's curator of Australian art said the painting's "combination of the poetic and the pragmatic, the decorative and the real", reflected Olley's own aesthetic preoccupations". Artist Emanuel Phillips Fox was an Australian painter living in Paris at the time that he produced this and several other paintings that depict the artist's wife and friends in the context of Parisian domesticity during the Belle Époque.