It is easy to see why Emanuel Phillips Fox’s Bathing hour (L’heure du bain) c.1909 is one of the most popular paintings in the Gallery’s Australian Art Collection: sun sparkling on a golden beach; a pretty woman in a lovely dress tenderly drying a little girl; a tranquil blue sea; children bathing and making sandcastles; elegant ladies and one — rather diminished — gentleman in conversation by the shore; figures dangling their feet over the edge of a rowing boat. It’s like a dream of an endless golden childhood; a dream that is vividly real in our memories, so real that it can evoke the excited cries of the children, the soft whisper of the tiny waves on the shore.
It is tempting immediately to associate this work with one of the aspects of Australian culture that is assumed to be essential to life: the culture of the beach; the
