Reference: see Deutscher and Hackett auction, important fine art + aboriginal art auction
2nd december 2015, Sydney. Lot 21 HILDA RIX NICHOLAS (1884 – 1961)
THE SHEPHERD OF KNOCKALONG, 1933
oil on canvas
99.5 x 80.5 cm
signed lower right: E.H. Rix Nicholas
bears inscription on Macquarie Galleries label verso:...33. THE SHEPHERD OF KNOCKALONG / 1933 (EDGAR WRIGHT AND RIX)...
$180,000 - 250,000
Provenance
Rix and Edgar Wright, New South Wales
Macquarie Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso)
Dr J. P. Rasmussen OAM, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1978
Exhibited
Anthony Hordern & Sons, Sydney
Exhibition by women artist's of Australia, Education Department's Art Gallery, Sydney, 12 – 25 July 1934
An Exhibition of Pictures of Australian Life and Landscape by Hilda Rix Nicholas, David Jones Art Gallery, Sydney, 15 June 1936, cat. 7
Hilda Rix Nicholas, 1884 – 1961, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 30 August – 18 September 1978, cat. 33 (label attached verso)
A Private Eye in a Public Place, St. Swithun's, Pymble, October 1980, cat. 78
Hilda Rix Nicholas, 1884 – 1961, Ian Potter Gallery, the University of Melbourne Museum of Art, 20 September – 27 October 1990, cat. 37 (label attached verso)
A Private Collection: A Century of Australian Heritage, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 20 June – 21 July 1991, cat. 62 (illus. exhibition catalogue)
Hilda Rix Nicholas: The Man for the Job, Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria, 23 January – 5 April 2010
Paris to Monaro: Pleasures from the studio of Hilda Rix Nicholas, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, 31 May – 11 August 2013
Literature
‘Big Display by Women Artist’s of Australia’, The Australian Women’s Weekly, 21 July 1934, p. 1 (illus.)
Draffin, N., Art of Hilda Rix Nicholas, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Project 26, Art in Australia, no. 6, 1987
Mendelssohn, J., 'Public grief, private happiness', The Bulletin, 2 October 1990, p. 102
Pigot, J., Hilda Rix Nicholas: Her Life and Art, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2000, pp. 62, 66, pl. 28 (illus.)
Peers, J., 'Hilda Rix Nicholas and William Frater: Impressive Monographs from Miegunyah Press', Art and Australia, vol. 38, no. 3, 2001, p. 388 (illus.)
Grishin, S., 'All hail the queen of Knockalong', Canberra Times, 28 June 2013
Engledow, S., Paris to Monaro: Pleasures from the studio of Hilda Rix Nicholas, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, 2013, p. 187 (illus.)
The Shepherd of Knockalong, 1933 is one of a series of pictures Hilda Rix Nicholas produced about the life on the land in the Monaro of New South Wales, one of the centres of Australia’s rich and productive pastoral history. Perhaps the most internationally recognised Australian artist of the early twentieth century, Rix Nicholas is a distinguished and important painter by any standard. Having trained at the National Gallery School, Rix Nicholas travelled abroad where she trained at the best Paris schools such as the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere with Claudio Castelucho and Théophile Alexandre Steinlen as well as the Académie Delecluse and Colarossi’s, where artists such as Henri Matisse worked over the same period. Early success came when Rix Nicholas’s oil, Retour de la Chasse was hung on the line at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1911. In 1913 she exhibited 35 works painted in Spain and Morocco at La Société des Peintres Orientalistes Français, and a further 11 works there in 1914. Her work was purchased by the couturier Leon Worth and the Gallery Luxembourg bought her oil, Le Grand Marché of 1912.
Following a very successful career exhibiting in Paris and Sydney following the years which she spent in London, Paris, Etaples and Tangiers when she was in her late twenties, Rix Nicholas underwent a period of great tragedy in her life, losing her Mother Elizabeth, her sister Elsie and her husband George Matson Nicholas during the years of the great war. She returned to Australia, accompanied by her brother-in -law, in May 1918. After a period of living and painting in Sydney during her thirties and also undertaking a trip back to Paris accompanied by Dorothy Richmond, Hilda Rix Nicholas met Edgar Wright during a painting trip to outback NSW with Dorothy. She married him 2 June 1928. Rix was born on September 25 1930 just after her 43rd birthday.
The Shepherd of Knockalong, is one of the first works that Hilda Rix Nicholas produced, following her return to painting in 1933-4, after the birth of her only child, (Barry) Rix Wright in September 1930. She had stopped painting during Rix’s infancy but following his growth into boyhood, Rix Nicholas began once again to translate the life around her into works of art. Rix Nicholas focussed upon her family’s station Knockalong, located in Delegate in the Monaro Plains.
Her letters and diaries are full of the delight which motherhood brought her and the pleasure she gained from organising parties for Rix and the children of the district which included pantomimes and plays which she performed in her studio in costume. Knockalong was a large and successful pastoral station, run by Edgar and his station hands. He is here represented as the ‘Shepherd of Knockalong’. Later in his life she painted a portrait of Edgar, inspecting the fleece in a woolshed on an adjoining property (The Fleece, 1945, National Gallery of Australia).In this delightful picture, we see Edgar standing astride the landscape, with Knockalong stretching behind him. He gently guides Rix with one arm, gazing fondly at his young son, who points towards the lamb he carries in the other. The work is a natural and happy portrait of family life in a pastoral setting and clearly illustrates the artist’s contentment with her role as wife and mother. Several years later she put these emotions into words when she wrote in a letter ‘I always think Edgar’s grand big character, his free, large and generous outlook is just like the big Tombong Range and distant hills and mountains – that his grand character, unselfish and large and brave has been influenced by the lovely large landscape he belongs to. It was this spaciousness and simplicity in him and in the space which drew me to him and his life, and in which I felt repose and complete rest after my full life and big sadness.’1
The painting was illustrated in a review of a large exhibition of the work of female artists held at the NSW Education Department in July 1934, which appeared in the Australian Women’s Weekly.2 The painting also promoted the retrospective Paris to Monaro: Pleasures from the Studio of Hilda Rix Nicholas, held at the National Portrait Gallery in 2013.
1. Letter from Hilda Rix Nicholas to Rix Wright, 3 October 1947, Rix Nicholas Archive quoted in Pigot, J., Hilda Rix Nicholas, Her Life and Art, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2000, p. 70
2. ‘Big Display by Women Artists of Australia’, Australian Women’s Weekly, 21 July 1934, p. 21
JEANETTE HOORN
Author of Hilda Rix Nicholas and Elsie Rix's Moroccan Idyll: Art and Orientalism, Miegunyah Press, 2012.
AND
22 HILDA RIX NICHOLAS (1884 – 1961)
SPRING AFTERNOON, KNOCKALONG, 1933
oil on canvas
80.5 x 99.0 cm
signed lower left: E.H. Rix Nicholas
bears inscription on Macquarie Galleries label verso:...34. SPRING AFTERNOON KNOCKALONG / 1933 (MRS. CAVANAGH AND RIX)...
$120,000 - 160,000
Provenance
Macquarie Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso)
Dr J. P. Rasmussen OAM, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1978
Exhibited
Hilda Rix Nicholas, 1884 – 1961, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 30 August – 18 September 1978, cat. 34 (illus. exhibition catalogue cover)
Paris to Monaro: Pleasures from the studio of Hilda Rix Nicholas, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, 31 May – 11 August 2013, p. 185 (illus.)
Literature
Pigot, J., Hilda Rix Nicholas: Her Life and Art, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2000, pp. 62, 63, pl. 43 (illus.)
Engledow, S., Paris to Monaro: Pleasures from the studio of Hilda Rix Nicholas, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, 2013, p. 185 (illus.)
Spring Afternoon, 1933 is a ‘pendant portrait’ to the Shepherd of Knockalong, 1933. These works were painted within days of each other. Young Rix is sporting the same clothing. His shirt and socks have been changed but otherwise he is wearing identical outfits. While the Shepherd of Knockalong has Hilda Rix Nicholas’s son represented on the property, under the watchful care of his father, Spring Afternoon, shows Rix playing with a small model sailing boat on one of the ponds found at Knockalong, under the watchful eye of his Governess, Mrs Cavanagh. She sits nearby, embroidering what appears to be a tablecloth. In this painting, the pastel palette, so often favoured by the artist, has been used to stunning effect. Mrs Cavanagh’s costume, a rather formal dress for station-wear, is a well-cut frock made of a rose-coloured linen that is reflected in the blossoms of the fruit trees that line the pond. These hues resonate in the pastures further in the distance, in the rolling hills that surround them and in the clouds that float across the landscape. The painting is one of domestic tranquillity in the outdoors as Mrs Cavanagh is engaged in the feminine task of needlework and childcare, while Rix occupies himself with keeping an eye on the sailing boat, which idly makes its way over the pond. Neither disturbs the other, there is harmony and peace in this rural Australian landscape in which the fruit trees of the garden, harmonise and co-exist peacefully with the Eucalypts that line the rolling pasture. The foreground of the picture, the enclosure that included the house and the garden, were Hilda’s domain, while the pastures belonged to Edgar. She was boss of one, and he the other.
In an exhibition of her work that was part of a group show at the New South Wales Education Department held in September 1934 she referred to her dual role as mother and artist. The writer of the review noted of the artist ‘Mrs Nicholas said she gave up her chosen work to rear her son, and enjoyed it. But now he is independent of her continued care, she has decided to take up painting once more.’1 Hilda had not expected to be a mother and when at 43 she fell pregnant, she could not contain her delight. She was nevertheless, excited to be able to return to painting. The exhibition included the work of over 120 female artists.
Both pictures are Australian icons that celebrate a way of life that now has faded. They are works that present Hilda Rix Nicholas’s facility for the genre in which she excelled, that of the figure in the landscape. Here she represents the beauty and abundance of life in pastoral Australia that is redolent of the Australia created by the Europeans in the years between the wars and through the talent of a painter who is now recognised as among the nation’s most original and best. When the Sun reviewed her solo exhibition in 1936 the critic noted ‘ We have in our Australian life a great many clever woman painters but this work goes beyond mere cleverness…It’s power is more than feminine though we see in it a womanly love of dress material and flowers and the things of the home, of children and animals and the more gracious things of life.’2
1. ‘Big Display by Women Artists of Australia’, Australian Women’s Weekly, 21 July 1934, p. 21
2. ‘Fine Exhibition by Woman Painter: Mrs Rix Nicholas’, The Sun, 16 June 1936, quoted in Pigot, J., Hilda Rix Nicholas, Her Life and Art, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2000, p. 64
JEANETTE HOORN
Author of Hilda Rix Nicholas and Elsie Rix's Moroccan Idyll: Art and Orientalism, Miegunyah Press, 2012
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