I feel the artist in me is dying and the dying is an agony ... only one's self knows the craving and the best part in one is aching unsatisfied. By this time, her health was deteriorating, and her passion for art fading. Rix Nicholas did exhibit alongside her son in a group exhibition in Sydney, in 1954; she presented two oil paintings, while her son had the largest sculpture in the show, titled "The Shearer". She died in Delegate on 3 August 1961. Gender was a recurring theme in Rix Nicholas's career, for better and for worse. Praise from a French art critic for her abilities was expressed by saying "[mademoiselle] Rix paints like a man!". An Australian critic was unsure what to say, admiring her composition but declaring her technique "strangely unfeminine", while another vitriolic review referred to the "pseudo-masculinity" of her works. Pigot considered that Rix Nicholas's career was ultimately penalised by her unwillingness to play by the male establishment's rules when she sought to stake out a woman's place in nationalist art in mid-twentieth century Australia. Sasha Grishin wrote that her "feminist tendencies and modernist touches were met with hostility". Art historian Catherine Speck had a different perspective on Rix Nicholas's post-World War I work, suggesting that it never subsequently attained the quality of her Paris output, because her first husband's death in the Great War drove her to create nationalist images of inconsistent quality. She suggested that Rix Nicholas's European works represented the modernist high point of the artist's career. Petersen agreed that "her tragic experiences during the war became integral to her artistic oeuvre and to her eventual concerns for national sentiment" but also thought that Rix Nicholas "continued to draw and paint with the same masterful sense of draughtsmanship, vigour and luminous paelette evident in her best work from Paris, Tangier and Sydney". In their reference work "A Story of Australian Painting", Mary Eagle and John Jones considered Rix Nicholas, alongside Clarice Beckett, to be "the best woman artist to emerge from the artistic milieu of Melbourne in the decade of the First World War". Many of Rix Nicholas's works went into private collections for which records are limited. Many more were burned in a fire at the family property after her death in the 1960s. Despite having been welcomed to Australia as an "international art celebrity" in 1919, her fortunes declined in the latter part of her career.