studio to its students. At this time she became only the second Australian to have a work acquired by the French government, and is considered by Australian curator Elena Taylor to be, after the established expatriates Bunny and Phillips Fox, "without doubt the most successful of the Australian artists in France". Moroccan paintings 1912–14 Many women artists visited and worked in north Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; Rix twice visited the region, resulting in some of her most significant artistic development and works. She first joined American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner, his wife and a Miss Simpson on a trip to Morocco in January 1912. They travelled via Spain, where Rix viewed the work of Velázquez, whose compositions and palette she greatly admired. The party's destination was Tangier, a place where many other artists had sought inspiration. Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant lived and painted there in the 1870s, while John Singer Sargent visited in the 1880s. Henri Matisse also visited Tangier in 1912 and, like Rix, travelled to Tétouan, about east of Tangier; they used the same models. For about three months, Rix sketched and painted in Tangier, spending time in the open-air market place or soko. Her enthusiasm for the place was evident from her correspondence: Picture me in this market-place – I spend nearly every day there for it fascinates me completely – have done 16 drawings and two oil things so far – Am feeling thoroughly at home now so am going to take out my big oil box – wanted to get used to people and things first – Oh how I do love it all! ... Oh the sun is shining I must out to work. Morocco had a similar effect on Rix as it did on many artists who visited. Paintings were created in high-keyed colours that captured the intense north African light, and most works focussed on the figures, dress and activity of the people, or the local architecture. One interpretation of the perspective of Rix is that she was an orientalist, in the sense used by academic Edward Said. Pigot, in his exhibition essay Capturing the Orient, considered how Rix's works "emphasise the exoticism" of the locations she portrays. Representing the Orient through the objective depiction of costumes and dress maintained the counterfeit truthfulness of orientalist imagery, concealing the reality of oriental life and the violence that underscored the colonial