Rita Angus was born on 12 March 1908 in Hastings, New Zealand, the eldest of five children.
Rita Angus was born on 12 March 1908 in Hastings, in New Zealand's Hawke's Bay region, the eldest of five children of William and Mary Angus. Her family soon moved to Palmerston North, where she grew up in a middle-class household that valued education and culture.
From an early age Angus displayed a strong artistic inclination, encouraged by her mother, who was herself a keen amateur painter. She attended Palmerston North Girls' High School before enrolling at the Canterbury College School of Art in Christchurch in 1927, a pivotal decision that set her on the path to becoming one of New Zealand's most important twentieth-century painters.
This early period, though not marked by a public 'first', is historically significant because it situates Angus within a generation of New Zealand women who sought professional training and careers in the arts at a time when such pursuits were still considered unusual for women, who were largely expected to marry and manage households. Angus's determination to pursue formal art education laid the foundation for a body of work that would later be recognised as central to the development of a distinctly New Zealand modernist visual language, encompassing portraiture, landscape and still life.
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