Hilda Rix Nicholas portrait collection

Significance of work

This extremely rare collection of nine drawings of identified and unidentified Australian soldiers was created during and in direct response to the First World War by the important Australian female artist, Hilda Rix Nicholas (1884-1961). As an artist Rix Nicholas was alone amongst her female peers in exploring themes of grief and war via such a sustained body of work. The uniqueness of this opportunity to strengthen the Memorial’s First World War art collection cannot be over-emphasised.

By the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 Hilda Rix Nicholas was living and working as an artist in France and was evacuated to London. The war shattered her life. She experienced the tragedy of war firsthand: her husband, Major George Matson Nicholas, DSO was killed in action while commanding the 24^th Battalion at Fleurs, France, five weeks after they were married in 1916. Her mother and sister also died during the war from enteric fever and the grief she experienced at the death of her husband and family members is expressed in her work.

Rix Nicholas returned to Australia in 1918 and took a studio in Mosman, Sydney in 1919. She made drawings of soldiers who had returned from the war and were yet to find employment. During this period she consciously set out to create artworks expressing national sentiment around the loss of Australians during the First World War, honouring her husband’s death in the process.

As a war widow, Rix Nicholas painted soldiers with what she felt was a quiet dignity “all the soldiers who have seen [my paintings] say they would have thought only a digger could have painted it, because I have the absolute spirit of the men ‘on the field’”. While popular with returned soldiers, Rix Nicholas’s work was not initially well received by the Australian arts establishment as she was working in a style and nationalistic sensibility not generally explored by women or considered an appropriate genre for women to work in at that time. Given this, the significance of her works of this period lie in their blend of personal and national values, related to the impact of the First World War on Australians, and its ongoing relevance today.

In summary, between 1916 and 1922 Rix Nicholas created a body of work inspired by her own grief and experience as a war widow which at the same time was a public memorialisation of the sacrifice and courage of Australian soldiers. As Australia did not appoint a woman as an official war artist until the Second World War, this collection is the most significant body of First World War related work by a female Australian artist and thus of extremely high national significance.

Artist biography

Emily Hilda Rix was born in Ballarat, Victoria in 1884. Her father was a notable mathematician and writer employed by the Department of Education. Her mother was a painter. Rix Nicholas attended Melbourne Church of England Girls Grammar School and, encouraged by her mother, studied art at the National Art Gallery School in Melbourne and with artist Frederick McCubbin. In 1907, after the death of her father the previous year, Rix Nicholas left Australia for Europe with her mother and younger sister Elsie. After a brief period in London the family moved to Paris where Rix Nicholas undertook further studies at the Academie Delecluse and the Grande Chaumiere. Prior to the outbreak of the First World War, she travelled within Europe and made several trips to North Africa with her sister.

The period 1910 to 1925 is arguably when the artist produced her best work. Living the life of an expatriate artist in the centre of the western art world Rix Nicholas was studying and working every day. The confidence and skill of her draughtsmanship is evident in the sensitively rendered portraits offered for acquisition. On her return to Australia in 1918 critics applauded her range and versatility at exhibitions in Sydney and Melbourne, defining her as an important Australian artist.

Her European imagery soon gave way to a distinctly nationalistic sensibility. Despite establishing an international reputation as an artist, Rix Nicholas’s work was not readily accepted by her contemporaries in Australia. Instead, it challenged the male-dominated cultural and aesthetic establishment, and her subject matter-Australian First World War soldiers-was rarely depicted by other Australian artists, male or female, at this time.

In 1928 Hilda married pastoralist Edgar Wright and moved to live with him on his property ‘Knockalong’ at Tombong near Delegate, NSW, further isolating her from the Australian art world. While she continued to exhibit intermittently in later life, her art became conservative in subject matter and style, and did not have the same expressive power of her earlier FWW work. Rix Nicholas died in 1961 at Delegate hospital.

In 1969 a retrospective of her work was held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales curated by Nicholas Draffin. This lead to a revival of interest in her work and the acquisition of the major painting A Man by the Memorial. More recently, her work has been the subject of additional exhibitions and retrospectives, further enhancing her reputation as an important Australian artist.