Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

and in away that was seen to be somewhat disconcerting. More significant than her 'French' style, however, was the fact that she chose to paint large, public pictures about Australian rural life at a time when the genre was the exclusive domain of men. In works such as The fair musterer Rix Nicholas proposed that women had been equal partners in the formation of the imagined community of the nation, a manoeuvre which challenged the patriarchal structure of Australian cultural life. The majority ofwriters and painters working in Melbourne and Sydney at the end of the nineteenth century had emphasised notions of manliness as crucial to the formation of national attitudes and values. Within this ideological framework, the role ofwomen was rarely acknowledged — women were inevitably cast as subordinate figures who had nothing of significance to offer a nationalist aesthetic founded by men and linked to ideas about masculinity. In the years following the First World War the bush ideal was enlarged and expanded by writers such as C. E. W. Bean, who equated the digger's fighting prowess with the bushman's 'up country' life. When the nationalist rhetoric of the 1890s was reinterpreted in the context of the 'Anzac' experience, the bush acquired an even greater significance. As far as Rix Nicholas was concerned, however, a woman had as much right to paint the bush as a man. Gender barriers were irrelevant to her choice of subject matter. 'The work is the thing that matters', she proclaimed, not who does it'.3 The emergence of Rix Nicholas's Australian works and her confident representation of women as equal partners in ideological life were influenced by her encounter with provincial life in the fishing port of Etaples in northern France, where she worked for a part of each year between 1910 and 1914. The peasantry had been one of the most important subjects in European painting during the nineteenth century and its continued acceptance in official circles at the beginning of the twentieth century meant that such subject matter became Above Hilda Rix Nicholas In Picardy 1914 Oil on canvas 61x51cm Felton Bequest 1918 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Right Hilda Rix Nicholas Monaro pioneer c.1922-23 Oil on canvas 80.8 X 64.9cm Gift of Mayne Nickless Limited through the Art Gallery of South Australia 1996 Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide an important model for Rix Nicholas, providing inspiration, guidance and what she later called 'salvation.4Furthermore, the use of rural themes was not gendered in France in quite the same way as it was in Australia. Anumber of women artists, such as Virginie Demont-Breton and Marie Cazin, specialised in peasant imagery and achieved considerable success at the Paris Salon. More often than not Rix Nicholas's Etaplean works portrayed women. Her drawings depicted them engaged in the daily business of the market-place, arguing over the price of produce and gossiping about local events. Her paintings, such as in Picardy 1914 (National Gallery of Victoria) and Grand Mère 1914 (The Art Gallery of New South Wales), represented women as single, indomitable and powerful figures who fill the canvas with their sense of weight and purpose. The vigorous application of paint enlivens the image and flattens the background space, pushing the figure against the surface of the picture plane. Resolute and forthright, these women are old, their hands and bodies bear the marks of time and suggest the strain and toil of honest labour. Following her return to Australia in 1918, Rix Nicholas received considerable recognition for her European pictures. However, she decided to redefine the nature of her art and commit it to the nation, thereby uniting her work with the heroic sacrifice made by her first husband, who had died during the First World War.5 Interviewed by the Daily Telegraph in 1927, she stated how important this commitment was: 'My husband, Major G. M. Nicholas, died fighting for Australia in France, and now I am fighting for Australia with my brush'.6 Rix Nicholas wanted her pictures to valorise Australia and its unique way of life. The fact that rural Australia had become a highly significant cultural site painted by men did not deter her resolve. Travelling through southern New South Wales towards the end of 1922, Hilda Rix Nicholas produced some of her most important pictures. They declare the 140 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965