Rij-Rousseau was born in Candé. From 1890 on, she lived in Paris and moved in an artistic circle with painters of the "Ile de la Grande Jatte" in Montmartre. She was a student of Maurice Denis and Paul Sérusier. Sérusier's had ideas about the relationship of music and painting. She used these ideas to form the theory of vibrism, which is a combination of Synthetic Cubism of the pre-war period and Larionov and Goncharova's Rayonism.