Hilda Rix Nicholas

(Australia, 01/09/1884 - 03/08/1961)

Defiance (c.1914)

Hilda Rix Nicholas’s rural landscapes and portraits of spirited soldiers were some of the most significant and impactful contributions to Australian art in the inter-war years, challenging conventional representations of the Australian landscape and people with her adoption of Post-Impressionist styles, one of the first Australians to do so.

Born in Ballarat, Victoria, in 1884, her father was a prominent teacher and poet, and her mother was a musician and artist who attended art classes at the National Gallery of Victoria School. With the support of her parents, Rix Nicholas would follow in her mother’s footsteps and, beginning in 1902, enrolled in drawing classes under the instruction of her mother’s old classmate, Fredrick McCubbin. During this time, she became an early member of the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors and exhibited illustrations with the Victorian Artists Society and The Austral Salon.

After graduating in 1905, she travelled to Europe with her mother and sister to further her studies, first in London and then Paris where she settled in 1907. Here, she joined the Société des Peintres Orientalistes Français and enrolled at both the Académie Delécluse and the Académie Colarossi, working to perfect her blend of social realism and post-impressionism.

Beginning in 1910, she spent three summers in the artists’ colony of Étaples where she drew and painted rural subjects, several of which were exhibited in the ‘New’ Salon in Paris in both 1911 and 1914. In 1912, she spent three months travelling through Morocco and Spain where she painted lively city centres, such as Grande marché, Tanger (1912) which was then purchased for the Musée du Luxembourg, making Rix Nicholad the second Australian artist to have had work acquired by the French government. The paintings she produced during this time formed her first solo exhibition in 1912 which resulted in significant international critical acclaim.

At the outbreak of World War One, Rix Nicholas, along with her mother and sister, were forced to flee France for England. The following four years were personally tumultuous: her sister, Elsie, died shortly after arriving in England in 1914, followed by her mother, Elizabeth, in early 1916. Shortly after, in September, she met Australian officer, Captain George Matson Nicholas and the pair married one month later in October 1916. After just three days together, her new husband returned to duty on the Western Front where he was killed in November 1916.

Returning to Australia in 1918, Rix Nicholas made an immediate impression within the art community when she exhibited over 100 of her French and Moroccan works in Melbourne and later Sydney. While several of her works were purchased by state galleries including the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, conservative critics were dismayed by the modern and ‘masculine’ aspects of the exhibition.

The distinctive and unorthodox nature of her palette owed a great deal to the fashionable style of the French Salon prior to the First World War and singled out her pictures from those of her contemporaries. Unfortunately, her refusal to conform to the gendered expectations of the Australian artistic establishment led to her rejection and the effects of conservative criticism, along with the ongoing toll of the deaths of her sister, mother and husband, contributed to Rix Nicholas abandoning her more experimental art in favour of academic and figurative subjects, ultimately to the detriment of her long-term career.

Between 1924 and 1926, Rix Nicholas returned to Europe where she exhibited her pastoral scenes that promoted the idea of Australia as a post-war Arcadia. She held a well-received exhibition in Paris, from which a second work, In Australia (1922), was purchased for the Musée du Luxembourg. Her works also toured England, making an impression on English viewers who had never seen Australian landscape and people painted in such a manner.

During this time, she also held exhibitions at the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers and the Beaux Arts Gallery, London, both in 1925, and the Royal Academy of Art in 1925 and 1926. Also in 1926, eight of her works were included in the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts exhibition in Paris, a remarkably high number for a single artist, and she was elected an Associate to the organisation in that same year.

Returning to Australia an international success, she and resumed painting primarily landscapes, although these were again panned by conservative critics who dismissed her work along with other women of the Post-Impressionist and Modernist movements. More significant than her ‘French’ style, however, was the fact that she chose to paint large, public pictures about rural Australian life at a time when the genre was the exclusive domain of men.

Within the ideological framework of her contemporaries, whereby the importance of masculinity was emphasised in the formation of national attitudes and values, women were cast as subordinate figures who had nothing of significance to offer and their achievements were rarely acknowledged. In her depiction of rural life, however, Rix Nicholas proposed that women had been equal partners in the formation of the imagined community of the nation, a manoeuvre which challenged the patriarchal structure of Australian cultural life and led to her rejection by the canon of art history.

Image: Hilda Rix Nicholas, Defiance (c.1914). Oil on canvas, 85 x 64.5 cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Australia.