Update and revised Michael Dunn's overview of Angus's life and career for refereed on-line encyclopedia of art produced by Oxford University Press, New York.

New Zealand painter. She studied at the Canterbury School of Art, Christchurch (1927-33). In 1930 she married the painter Alfred Cook and used the signature Rita Cook until 1946; they separated in 1934. Her painting Cass (1936; Christchurch, NZ, C.A.G. Te Puna o Waiwhetu) is representative of the Regionalist school that emerged in Canterbury during the late 1920s, with the small railway station capturing both the isolation and the sense of human progress in rural New Zealand. The influence of North American Regionalism can be seen in Angus’s work of the 1930s and 1940s. However, Angus was a highly personal painter, not easily affiliated to specific movements or styles. Her style involved a simplified but fastidious rendering of form, with firm contours and seamless tonal gradations. Her paintings were invested with symbolic overtones, often enigmatic and individual in nature.