HILDA RIX NICHOLAS Australian, 1884-1961

From the time of her first art studies, young Hilda Emily Rix was serious in her ambitions.  Picardy Girl dates from her first years in Europe, when one of her paintings was hung ‘on the line’ at the Paris Salon – in 1912 she was only twenty-six - and another was purchased by the French government. Decorative in its striking colour scheme, carefully designed and worked with a fluent bravura, Picardy Girl reveals her immersion in, and highly personal expression of, international impressionism.

Born in Ballarat, she was encouraged by her artist mother, especially after the family moved to Melbourne. She was at the National Gallery School from 1902 until 1907, when, after the unexpected death of their father, she and her elder sister Elsie departed for Europe. ¹ At first she enrolled at the New Art School in Kensington. In Paris from October she attended the Académie Delecluse and the Académie de la Grand Chaumière. She visited Ethel Carrick and Emanuel Phillips Fox; and took lessons with Richard Miller, a fashionable and successful American impressionist. From Miller, she said, she learned ‘agile brush work’, the painterly technique and colour that gave his paintings the modern look of impressionism whilst retaining solid forms and realist compositional principles.

Like many artists in Paris, Rix spent part of each year in the countryside or on the coast. Picardy Girl was painted in the fishing village of Etaples in northern France, well known as an artists’ colony – very popular with Americans and a number of Australians over the years. Rix first visited in July 1910 and stayed six months. She returned every summer until the outbreak of the First World War.

Picardy Girl was probably painted in the garden of her rented studio. It may well have been the work - ‘a peasant model among the flowers’ - admired by the French painter Jules Adler, who had an adjoining studio. ²  Elsie Rix sometimes sat as a model for her sister, but Picardy Girl is not Elsie. Indeed one of the attractions of Etaples was the willing and inexpensive artists’ models - so this is quite likely a local girl. Relaxed, even languid, she is informally posed against an enclosing background that flattens the picture space and brings the figure close to the viewer. Hilda Rix did not represent her peasant subjects in the conventional manner of many of her contemporaries. Picardy Girl is no stereotypical rural worker. Rather, she is presented as an individual with thoughts and dreams and an inner life of her own. Rix felt strongly that familiarity with both classic and modern European culture was imperative for Australian artists, opening the way to a far richer and more sophisticated repertoire of subject and style. In their turn, French critics recognized her ‘keen decorative intuition, an innate sense of light, the true appreciation of nature and of life, of which she has been a passionate observer’. ³

In 1916, having abandoned her French studio after the outbreak of war and following the deaths of both her sister and mother, she met and married Major George Matson Nicholas, an Australian who had been wounded at Gallipoli and won a DSO at Pozières. Tragically he was killed in action on 14 November 1916, only six weeks after their marriage. With her life in seeming disarray, the artist returned to Australia in 1918. In Sydney, Grace Cossington Smith saw her exhibition of European paintings and was enormously impressed: ‘I went to see it 3 or 4 times and any other picture seems very dull after seeing these’, she wrote, ‘The most astonishing thing was the life in them’. ⁴

Hilda Rix Nicholas went back to France in the 1920s. Uniquely for an Australian woman artist, the French government purchased a second work, In Australia, for the Musée du Luxembourg (now in the Musée nationale d’art moderne) and in 1926 she was elected an Associate of the New Salon. However she always felt herself to be an expatriate in Europe. She returned to Australia in 1928 and her work is now represented in the national and all Australian state galleries as well as in French and British public collections.

1. The biographical details in this essay are indebted to the work of the late John Pigot, especially in Hilda Rix Nicholas, her Life and Art, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2000.

2. Quoted in Draffin, N., Hilda Rix Nicholas 1884-1961, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1978; and see Pigot, op. cit., p. 19.

3. Notre Gazette, Paris, quoted in the catalogue of her exhibition at the Guild Hall, Melbourne, November 1918.

5. 10 August 1919; quoted in Pigot, J., Hilda Rix Nicholas 1884-1961, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 1990, p. 6.