Art students

Art students' was set at the Melbourne Art School in Bourke Street, which E Phillips Fox co-founded with Tudor St George Tucker when Fox returned from Europe in 1892. It was considered a groundbreaking work for its unconventional vertical, cropped composition and its frank naturalism. The informal poses and paint-splattered smocks of its female students and the messy realism of its littered floor were considered ‘unfeminine’ when the work was first exhibited in Melbourne in 1895.

'Art students' is a vivid demonstration of Fox’s compositional and colouristic skills. Its grand-scale informality also presents an alternative to the heroic ‘national’ and masculine subjects of Australian painting in the 1890s.