Born in the Victorian city of Ballarat, she studied under a leading Australian Impressionist, Frederick McCubbin, at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School from 1902 to 1905 and was an early member of the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors.

A 1925 exhibition in Paris led to the sale of her work In Australia to the Musée du Luxembourg, followed by an extensive tour of her paintings around regional British art galleries.

Though she continued to paint significant works including The Summer House and The Fair Musterer, Rix Nicholas, a staunch critic of modernism and disdainful of emerging major artists such as Russell Drysdale and William Dobell, grew out of step with trends in Australian art.

[5] Her artistic efforts drew praise while she was attending high school at Melbourne Girls Grammar (known as Merton Hall),[1] though in most other respects Rix was not an outstanding student.

[22] Continuing to acquire skills from a wide range of artists, she next studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, including with Swiss-born illustrator Théophile Steinlen.

[24][25] Among the artists active there was Frenchman Jules Adler, who took an interest in Rix's work, as well as many Australians, including Rupert Bunny, James Peter Quinn, Edward Officer and one of the colony's longest-term residents, Iso Rae.

An initial engagement turned sour, however, when Rix spent time at her fiancé's home, where she found her prospective husband dominated by his mother, who strongly disapproved of the match.

Paintings were created in high-keyed colours that captured the intense north African light, and most works focussed on the figures, dress and activity of the people, or the local architecture.

[44]On the other hand, Hoorn argues that Rix and her sister were to a significant extent counter-orientalist: they focussed on the common nature of human experience rather than cultural expressions of difference[45] and they sought to portray everyday life in Tangier as they found it, rather than presenting generalised views of the orient.

[46] Her works similarly reflect a modernist approach to the empirical: in using the bright light of north Africa to help bring out the structures and shapes that made up visual impressions.

[47] Hoorn wrote: She did not seek out or embellish her pictures with the "orientalist" stereotypes that she had learned while growing up in Melbourne...In her writing and painting, she actively campaigned against what she saw as the fakery of "orientalism".

[51] They demonstrate the development of her style at the time: loose brush strokes, a palette confined to a few low-keyed colours, and an emphasis on shadow and light, affecting both the overall impression made by the picture and the treatment of individual figures.

[71][72][73] Initially writing in her diary that she had lost the will to live, Rix Nicholas's grief eventually found its expression in three paintings, titled And Those Who Would Have Been Their Sons, They Gave Their Immortality (a phrase from a poem by Rupert Brooke), Desolation and Pro Humanitate.

The second of these paintings (which was destroyed by fire in 1930), portrayed a gaunt and tearful woman shrouded in a black cloak, crouched staring at the viewer amidst a battlescarred landscape, featureless but for the crosses on distant graves.

The reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald wrote of the painting: Desolation is almost gruesome in the grim delineation of the figure typifying all the widowed world in one lone woman.

[81] At the same time, in Melbourne's Guild Hall she held a large exhibition of her European and north African paintings, sketches and drawings, with over a hundred works on display.

"[84] When the exhibition travelled to Sydney in 1919, reviews were likewise positive both from newspapers and from her peers such as Julian Ashton, Antonio Dattilo Rubbo and Grace Cossington Smith.

[87] Nevertheless, Pigot has argued that her place in the Australian art world at the time was complex, and her style was affected by vigorous debate around the emergence of modernism, which was being resisted by local critics.

Pigot suggests that gender was a factor: "While Rix Nicholas's claim to be a war artist was legitimate, the fact that she was a woman meant that she was denied an equal place within the discourse".

[96] At the time of her 1919 exhibition, Rix Nicholas had commented that she wished "to show the people [of Europe] what is possessed in a land of beauty where the colour scheme is so different, and which sent so many gallant men to the struggle for liberty".

[3] While Australian patriotic imagery and discourse of the period was very male-dominated, Rix Nicholas's portraits were frequently of women, such as in The Monaro Pioneer, The Magpie's Song and Motherhood.

[101][notes 7] Arriving in Paris in June, eventually Rix Nicholas rented a studio in Montparnasse, which had previously belonged to French artist Rosa Bonheur.

Painted not with the artist's typical technique, but in a mannerist style, the subject faces the viewer yet is glancing away, her pose tense, expression unreadable, with a bunch of discarded flowers on the ground next to the hem of her enormous formal dress.

There is nothing finicky about it; it tells its story with vivid directness...The artist has brought out with revealing strokes an expression of vindictive malice which is for the moment resting there; and the hands, the fingers of one grasped tightly by the other, give a clear indication of nervous tension within.

[132] Rix Nicholas's works remained insistent in their idealism about rural Australia, but following World War II, the country – and its art critics – had moved on.

She was appalled by the works of Russell Drysdale and William Dobell, describing the figures in their paintings as "more like victims of the German prison camps" than representations of Australian people.

[138] Following her last solo exhibition, a letter from Rix Nicholas to her son expressed despair in her artistic career and summarised the professional fate of her final years: Not doing anything creative is nearly killing me.

[143] Pigot considered that Rix Nicholas's career was ultimately penalised by her unwillingness to play by the male establishment's rules when she sought to stake out a woman's place in nationalist art in mid-twentieth century Australia.

[147] Petersen agreed that "her tragic experiences during the war became integral to her artistic oeuvre and to her eventual concerns for national sentiment" but also thought that Rix Nicholas "continued to draw and paint with the same masterful sense of draughtsmanship, vigour and luminous paelette evident in her best work from Paris, Tangier and Sydney".

[93] Internationally, Rix Nicholas is represented in the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume and Leicester Museum & Art Gallery, as well as by her works in the Luxembourg.