the early 1920s. He is portrayed on horseback, a pipe clasped in his exposed and bright teeth, with a panoramic backdrop of an Australian pastoral landscape. His stance is casual, self-assured and heroic, consistent with the up-beat nationalism of Australia at the time. 1925 saw further exhibitions, including at the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, and the Royal Academy of Art, both in London. A solo exhibition that December at the Beaux Arts Gallery, London, displayed His Land, which was described as having "the rare quality of conveying the spirit of life in the Commonwealth as well as portraying that life pictorially ... the whole picture seems to convey the sunny heat-laden atmosphere of Australia". Like In Australia, this work suggests the elemental strength and vitality that Rix Nicholas advocated should pervade Australian painting. That year, Rix Nicholas created one of her most extraordinary and largest works. Standing almost high, and wide, Les fleurs dédaignées ('The despised flowers') is an "unnerving" and "arresting" portrait of a young woman in fashionable eighteenth-century clothing. Painted not with the artist's typical technique, but in a mannerist style, the subject faces the viewer yet is glancing away, her pose tense, expression unreadable, with a bunch of discarded flowers on the ground next to the hem of her enormous formal dress. Although portraying a young lady, the person chosen to sit was "a Parisian professional model and a prostitute, apparently with a reputation for being moody and cantankerous". The pastiche created in this work is striking: a sixteenth-century artistic style, a composition comprising a seventeenth-century tapestry and an eighteenth-century dress, created by a twentieth-century artist. It certainly reflected the scope of Rix Nicholas's abilities and ambitions, and was painted with the specific intention of having it hung at the Paris Salon. When the work was displayed in Sydney in 1927, it grabbed The Sydney Morning Herald critic's attention: While she exhibited many of the Australian works completed before arriving in France, she was also creating many new works, including illustrations and portraits of traditional life and costume, produced during a summer in Brittany. In 1926, Rix Nicholas was again included in London's Royal Academy of Art exhibition, where one of her Brittany paintings, Le Bigouden, was hung. She appeared at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts Spring exhibition in Paris, in which she had eight works, a very large number for a single artist.