Cecil Higgs was born in the Orange Free State and finished her schooling in Grahamstown. She studied briefly at the Grahamstown School of Art before all educational institutions were closed in 1917 because of the Spanish influenza epidemic. In 1920, she went to study at Goldsmiths' College in London, and from 1926, at the Royal Academy under Walter Sickert. Higgs also spent some time at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, under André Lhote. The great depression affected her family’s ability to provide financial support, and Higgs returned to South Africa in 1933, taking up an offer of a studio in Stellenbosch in 1935. She held her first solo exhibition at the university that year and met fellow artists Wolf Kibel, Lippy Lipshitz and John Dronsfield, who remained lifelong friends of hers. In 1939, she joined the New Group, started by Lipschitz, Freida Lock, Gregoire Boonzaier and Terence McCaw in 1937.

Higgs’s work included figural subjects, portraits and still lifes, and after her move to Sea Point, Cape Town, in 1946, marine subjects became the focus of many compositions, particularly shells, sea anemones and rock pools. Her work became increasingly abstract as she developed her interest in the rhythmic interplay of form and colour, the materiality of thickly encrusted paint applied with a palette knife rather than a brush, and the shimmering effects of light across the textured surface of the canvas. The last major exhibition of Higgs’s work was a retrospective to celebrate her 75th birthday at the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town in 1975.