Critics described her work as conservative and, as one said, falling between the extremes of a meticulous accuracy of illustration, on the one hand, and "the sketchy contrivance of an illusionistic picture", on the other.

[1] By temperament neither experimental nor innovative, she adopted a style in which another critic said, "professional competence and good taste" took precedence over "imagination and adventure".

She showed mostly in large exhibitions held by nonprofit organizations and, although she lived and worked mainly in Manhattan, she did not associate herself with any commercial galleries in that city.

Olinsky was born in Florence, Italy, on March 11, 1909, to parents who had emigrated from Eastern Europe to the United States in the first years of the century.

[4][6] Living in Manhattan with her parents, she received training at home from her father, Ivan Olinsky, who was a noted portrait painter and art teacher.

[3] Whether living with her parents or on her own, Olinsky generally spent the colder months in Manhattan and the warmer ones in the art colony of Old Lyme.

Kruse, in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, called attention to a "surety and briskness of touch", and Melville Upton, in the New York Sun, said it was a "brilliant showing".

[2][20][28][29] Writing about the 1958 show, the painter Tom Ingle wrote: "Professional competence and good taste distinguish all of Tosca's works, taking precedence over imagination and adventure.

[17][18][19] Located between photographic exactitude, at one extreme, and nonobjective abstraction, on the other, this style, in company with her technique and choice of subjects, varied little during her career.

[1][2] In 1943, one reviewer grouped her with other National Academy artists who resisted innovation and showed no temptation to experiment, and, in 1958, another noted the limited scope of her work, praising her for attaining success within the relatively narrow boundaries that she had set for herself.

In 1930, Rochelle Brackman, in the Hartford Courant, wrote of her "honest seeking for true color"[14] and, the same year, Elizabeth Belle Tyler, in the Springfield Daily Republican, discussed the "unusual charm" in one of her flower paintings.

Kruse drew attention to her "surety and briskness of touch"[25] and another critic, Howard Devree, saw in the same paintings an "emotional approach" that conveyed Olinsky's personal reactions to her subjects.