Self portrait (Hilda in the Chinoise hat)

Emily Hilda Rix (1884-1961), artist, left Australia in March 1907, having trained for three years at the National Gallery School. She, her sister Elsie and their widowed mother Elizabeth proceeded from London – where Hilda studied at the New Art School – to Paris, where she attended art classes at the Académie Delecluse and the Grande Chaumière. She and Elsie spent several exhilarating periods in Tangier, Morocco, where she made many striking paintings and drawings reflecting her passion for costume; and in the artists’ colony of Étaples. Returning to London at the outbreak of the First World War, by 1916 she had lost her sister and her mother to typhoid fever. She married an Australian soldier, George Nicholas, but he was killed in France within weeks of their wedding. She returned to Australia in 1918, settling in Mosman, where she painted gardens and friends around the harbour. An intrepid car traveller, in 1928 she began a new life as the wife of Edgar Wright, owner of the grazing property Knockalong on the southern Monaro. There, she designed a free-standing French-style studio, into which she moved her paintings, drawings, costumes and mementoes of foreign lands; there, into the mid-1940s, she painted high-coloured scenes of the Australia that ‘rode on the sheep’s back’, and the vigorous people who worked the land.

Gift of Bronwyn Wright 2013. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program.
© Bronwyn Wright