RHODA CARLETON HOLMES NICHOLLS

(1854-1930)

 Rhoda Holmes Nicholls was a painter of figures, florals, and landscapes, and was especially noted as a watercolorist. She was a prize-winning artist who exhibited widely in many late 19th and early 20th-century expositions in the United States. Though born in Coventry, England in 1854, she came permanently to America in 1884 with her husband, American artist Burr Nicholls (1848 - 1915), whom she married in England in that year.

Nicholls was a highly regarded woman painter who had spent her early years studying in England and Italy, with many subsequent trips to paint there throughout her life. In the United States Nicholls quickly established a reputation, winning medals at the New York Prize Fund Exhibition in 1886, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, the Atlanta (Georgia) Exposition in 1895, and other major shows. Among her professional memberships were the National Association of Women Artists, the New York Watercolor Society, the American Water Color Society and the National Arts Club. She exhibited in fourteen exhibitions of the National Academy of Design from 1884 to 1917, eleven annual exhibitions of the Pennsylvania Academy between 1884 and 1903, and twenty-five exhibitions of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1888 to 1918.