page_title: Nasturtiums (E. Phillips Fox)
section_title: Subject
hierarchical_section_title: Nasturtiums (E. Phillips Fox) / Subject
caption_attribution_description: English: Monet moved to Argenteuil, a suburban town on the right bank of the Seine River northwest of Paris, in late December 1871. Many of the types of scenes that he and the other Impressionists favored could be found in this small town, conveniently connected by rail to nearby Paris. In this painting, Monet was less interested in capturing a likeness than in studying how unblended dabs of color could suggest the effect of brilliant sunlight filtered through leaves. During the early 1870s, Monet frequently depicted views of his backyard garden that included his wife, Camille, and their son, Jean. However, when exhibited at the Second Impressionist Exhibition in 1876, this painting was titled more generically, "Woman Reading."
context_page_description: 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".
context_section_description: Nasturtiums is one of a series of paintings of women in gardens that Fox created in 1911–12. Many were painted in-situ in the small central courtyard garden of the Fox studio-apartment on Boulevard Arago in Montparnasse. Although the subject is known and recognisable from other works, the painting's title and the period in which it was painted show that it is an example of how "the borderline between portrait and subject painting was often blurred." At the time, in spite of the fact that portraiture was popular and likeness to the subject valued in the salons, artists were showing a growing interest in the formal aspects of the work and they had begun to name their paintings after their aesthetic elements. Fox has not given the model's name as the title of this work, giving it instead the title of a subject picture, thereby directing the viewer's attention to the setting and his interest in the aesthetic values of that setting.
  In spite of these formal and decorative intentions, the painting is one in which "the artist illustrated the elegance of the Belle Époque and the sunny pastimes of the bourgeoisie". Fox frequently painted women reading in both indoor and outdoor settings, another example is A Love Story (1903) in the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery which shows an elegantly dressed young lady reading a novel while lying in a hammock in the shade of a tree on a summer's day. In paintings of the time, women reading were often placed in an outdoor setting where gardens, foliage and the effects of the light were part of the subject matter. Claude Monet, for example, painted Springtime in 1872. Fox's The Lesson (1912) in the National Gallery of Victoria Melbourne, shows a woman and girl reading in an indoor, domestic setting. 
  It has been argued that such relaxed poses and settings were regarded as "typically feminine" and that paintings of men reading were different in that men are typically portrayed indoors as "busy, upright, professional, erudite" with serious non-fiction books around them.
caption: Claude Monet – Springtime, 1872 in the Walters Art Museum
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