She is best known for having painted portraits of notable figures in Australian history, including Dame Nellie Melba, William Bridges, J. F. Archibald and Henry Lawson.

One 1909 critic went so far as to say that gender was irrelevant in her case: 'Sex is an accident — the capacity for expressing the infinitely large or the infinitesimally little cannot be gauged by outward measurements.

Else, why does Florence Rodway, tall, slight and blonde, revel in peopling large spaces with the Titanic creatures of her imagination.

In a newspaper review of the Society of Artists' 1916 exhibition, she was commended as: 'the principal "dealer in magic and spells" due to pastel effort is Miss Florence Rodway, whose portraits are again one of the leading features of the show.

The most striking example of her talent is the strong, young, handsome face of a woman full of vitality and expression, in which the flesh-tones show up admirably against the yellow, gold-tinted background.

Miss Rodway's portraits of children are charming, and we like also the homely interior entitled "The New Teapot," in which the artist's fine appreciation of the pastel medium is markedly apparent.

[10] The Australian War Memorial commissioned portraits of William Bridges (1920), Henry Normand MacLaurin (1922) and Captain Walter Gilchrist (1925).

She was chosen to represent Australia in 1928, with other artists including Thea Proctor, Margaret Preston, John Longstaff, Arthur Streeton and Hans Heysen, at the London exhibition of contemporary art of the Empire at the Imperial Institute, South Kensington.