Biography
Henrietta Catherine Angus was born on 12 March 1908 in Hastings. Angus was the eldest of seven children of William McKenzie Angus and Ethel Violet Crabtree. In 1921, her family moved to Palmerston North and she attended Palmerston North Girls' High School between 1922 and 1926. There her talent for art was recognised and she was encouraged to pursue it further. In 1927 she began studying at the Canterbury College School of Art.
She married Alfred Cook, another artist, on 13 June 1930, but in 1934 they separated due to incompatibility, and divorced in 1939. Angus signed many of her paintings as Rita Cook between 1930 and 1946, but after she discovered in 1941 that Alfred Cook had remarried she changed her surname by deed poll to McKenzie, her paternal grandmother's name. As a result, some of her paintings are also signed R. Mackenzie or R. McKenzie, but the majority are signed Rita Angus.
Angus lived mostly in Christchurch during the 1930s and 1940s. In the late 1940s she suffered from mental illness and entered Sunnyside Mental Hospital in 1949. In 1950 she moved to Waikanae to convalesce, and after some more travels around New Zealand she settled in Wellington in 1955.
From December 1969, Angus' condition rapidly deteriorated and she later died in Wellington Hospital of ovarian cancer on 25 January 1970.
Read more about this topic: Rita Angus
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