Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

A NATIONAL HEROINE Hilda Rix Nicholas The fairmusterer John Pigot Facing page Hilda Rix Nicholas Australia 1884-1961 The fair musterer 1935 Oil on canvas 102.3 X 160.4cm Purchased 1971 Queensland Art Gallery Below left Nance Edgley posing for The fair musterer. Black and white photograph by Hilda Rix Nicholas, Rix Nicholas Archive, Delegate, NSW Below right Hilda Rix Nicholas Study for 'The fair musterer' c.1935 Crayon on paper 23 X 30.5cm Gift of Rix Wright 1998 Queensland Art Gallery D ressed in jodhpurs, a short- sleeved shirt and riding boots, Hilda Rix Nicholas's 'fair musterer' is ready for the day's work. Her nonchalant pose is easy, confident and self-assured; it suggests that she is both an accomplished horsewoman and a capable bushworker, a woman who actively participates in the life of rural Australia. Painted during the spring of 1935 not far from Rix Nicholas's new and spacious studio at Knockalong in southern New South Wales, The fair musterer (Queensland Art Gallery) is one of Rix Nicholas's largest and most important pictures. Along with several other works it marks the resumption of her professional career after the birth of her son in 1930. The model was Nance Edgley, her son's first governess who worked at Knockalong during 1934 and 1935. One of the artist's favourite views of the Tombong Range and the neighbouring property of Tombong can be seen in the distance. Exhibited in London in 1937 at the 'Artists of the British Empire Overseas' exhibition, The fair musterer was widely featured in the British press, where it was acclaimed as 'one of the outstanding pictures in the exhibition'1 and 'typically Australian in both subject and treatment'.2 Rix Nicholas rarely made preliminary drawings or studies, preferring to paint directly onto the canvas, although she did complete one rough study for The fair musterer. It was drawn quickly and decisively, the arrangement of the composition defined at the outset with only minor adjustments becoming necessary as the painting evolved. The artist also used a photograph she had taken of Nance, posed in riding gear against the Knockalong landscape, as a compositional key for the painting. The cool blond tonality of The fair musterer is typical of Rix Nicholas's style at this point in her career, as is her tendency to use different brushwork on figure and ground, a device that emphasises and sharpens the silhouette of the main group. The picture was completed in successive stages, the landscape blocked in first, while the main subject was treated more academically and received more time and attention. The landscape was the last part of the composition to be finished, the sketchiness of the brushstrokes suggesting that Rix Nicholas considered it to be a less significant part of the composition. Rix Nicholas's style was unusual in Australia between the wars; it was out of keeping with conventional artistic practice and challenged well-established ideas about the way rural Australia should be represented. The distinctive and unorthodox nature of her palette owed a great deal to the fashionable style of the French Salon prior to the First World War and singled out her pictures from those of her contemporaries such as Arthur Streeton and Hans Heysen, whose imagery popularly symbolised the nature of 'Australianness' during the 1920s and 1930s. Rix Nicholas's pictures referred to the same kinds of ideals and values, but her livelier painting methods meant that she represented the landscape differently, 138 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965