Grace Cossington Smith (20 April 189220 December 1984) was an Australian artist and pioneer of modernist painting in Australia and was instrumental in introducing Post-Impressionism to her home country. Examples of her work are held by every major gallery in Australia.
Biography
She was born Grace Smith, in Neutral Bay, Sydney, second of five children of London-born solicitor Ernest Smith and his wife Grace, née Fisher, who was the daughter of the rector of Cossington in Leicestershire. The family moved to Thornleigh, New South Wales around 1890. Grace attended Abbotsleigh School for Girls in Wahroonga 1905–09 where Albert Collins and Alfred Coffey took art classes. From 1910 to 1911 she studied drawing with Antonio Dattilo Rubbo. From 1912 to 1914 she and her sister lived in England, staying with an aunt at Winchester where she attended drawing classes as well as classes at Stettin in Germany, and was exposed to paintings by Watteau in Berlin.
After returning to Sydney in 1914 she attended Dattilo Rubbo's painting classes alongside Norah Simpson and took an interest in modernist theories. Her The Sock Knitter (1915) has been acclaimed as Australia's first post-Impressionist painting to be exhibited in the Country.
Smith adopted the middle name "Cossington" in 1920.
Her work was greatly respected by fellow-artists Roland Wakelin and Roy de Maistre. She exhibited with the Royal Art Society of New South Wales from 1915, the Society of Artists from 1919 and Thea Proctor's Contemporary Group at Adrian Feint's Grosvenor Gallery from 1926 to 1928, and from 1932 to 1971, at the Macquarie Galleries.
Her painting style is characterised by individual, square brush strokes with bright unblended colours. Her many paintings of Sydney landscapes, still lifes, and interiors include Kuringai Avenue (1943), Fruit in the Window (1957), and, arguably her most famous painting, The Lacquer Room (1936). She received acclaim late in her career, and in 1973 a major retrospective exhibition of her work toured Australia.
Notable works Hailed as one of Australia's most important artists of the twentieth century, Cossington Smith was best known for her modernist depiction of a Sydney cafeteria, paintings of the arch of the Sydney Harbour Bridge as it was being built, and her late indoor scenes of doorways and windows where yellow is usually the dominant colour. Many of her scenes give a glimpse of the ordinary suburban home of her time: still lives, doorways and window sills. She also painted important events such as the World Wars and the arrival of the Prince of Wales in Sydney, which show a broader view of what was happening in Australia and the world at the time.
She used sunlight and patterns of vibrant colour with cool colours added to shadows, giving them a sense of energy. Using carefully placed brush strokes of brilliant colour side by side to build up small squares, she built form in colour. She was one of the earliest Australian artists to be influenced by the European Post-Impressionist movement and lead a break away from Australian Impressionism. A contemporary of Margaret Preston and Thea Proctor, her works were considered very daring for the time. Her main interest was colour and its interaction with reflected sunlight. She supported modernism and developed her own individual technique. It was said that she "did get a lot of criticism in the press, but she was very bold and she knew what she wanted".
Cossington
Cossington Smith grew up in her family's first house, Cossington, in the Sydney suburb of Neutral Bay. In 1920, they moved to what had previously been a Quaker meeting-house, which they also called Cossington, at 43 Ku-Ring-Gai Avenue, Turramurra, where she was to live most of her life. Both were named after her mother's original home, Cossington Hall, in Leicestershire, England. Cossington in Turramurra is heritage-listed.
First World War Arriving in Australia back from a holiday to England shortly before the First World War began, Smith supported the war effort. Her 1915 painting The Sock Knitter, pictured her sister knitting socks for the war effort, is regarded as the first Post-Impressionist painting to be exhibited in Australia. She also later drew a series of cartoons which were satirical and anti-German, showing caricatures of German army figures. Such drawings of wartime figures were very different from the usual style in her work. Other works of the time were a drawing of Belgian refugees fleeing the Germans at the start of the war and one titled Reinforcements: troops marching () which show strong patterns and colour.
Sydney Cossington Smith painted the city of Sydney, its people, the crowds and places such as restaurants or Martin Place in the City Centre. She went to the city often to sketch, though she was somewhat embarrassed with drawing in public. When the Prince of Wales visited the city, Grace went to the city to record this event. She did sketches of the buildings around where she was standing, but relied on memory to record the actual moment when he passed by. Her painting, The Prince (1920), records the scene of the prince being driven in his car through the street lined with a large crowd of people. It depicts the warm reception which Australians gave to the British royalty at the time, when Australia was still very much part of the British Empire. She followed this painting with other paintings based on sketches done in Sydney city, of crowds of people rushing past in Rushing (), almost at humorous pace, with one woman looking at the viewer with a surprised expression. These paintings depict Sydney as a busy city with large crowds of people going to and from their jobs. A less hurried crowd is shown in Crowd, which shows a massive crowd nonetheless, almost all of them wearing hats, reflecting the fashion of the time.
Turramurra paintings Cossington Smith's paintings of the area around Turramurra show the development of Sydney in the northern suburbs. Her street scenes often showed roads going up and down hills. Her landscapes were often based around a road. Her paintings, Eastern Road, Turramurra and ‘’Pentecost’’, show roads very similar to many of the roads around hilly Turramurra, which have many dips and bends in them.
Modernism Cossington Smith was one of the first artists to bring Modernism to Australia. Her painting The Sock Knitter, 1915, is widely celebrated. It was "acclaimed as the first post-impressionist painting to be exhibited in Australia." The painting shows a girl studiously working away, knitting from a ball of yarn which sits delicately by her side. When taken in the context of the war, it could be interpreted as someone working on something small to help a greater cause.
Cossington Smith studied in Australia and England and her work was informed by the Modernist paintings of Europe, she shared the Modernist concerns about painting, including: investigating colour theory, playing with the picture plane (the illusion of depth in a painting), the use of expressive brush strokes and an abstracted composition. About The Sock Knitter it is said that "The extreme flattening of the picture plane and the use of bright, expressive, broken colour applied in broad brush-strokes to delineate form reflects the aesthetic concerns of European painters such as Cézanne, Matisse and van Gogh." Despite these tendencies she became a foundation member of, and exhibited with, Robert Menzies' anti-modernist organisation, the Australian Academy of Art.
Some of her paintings from around 1932–33 reflected some common interests of international contemporary painters. These paintings show objects being broken down into forms based on their colours similar to Cézanne, and have a cubist manipulation of some of the imagery. Her House With Trees, 1935, shows houses in pink, with unnatural blues for some of the bushes surrounding them. A distortion of the realist colours is apparent, with distortion also of the perspective lines of the actual house.
The Lacquer Room (1936), showing a view across an Art Deco styled café called the Soda Fountain, which was then located in the David Jones department store in Sydney. The work itself is highly stylised, with pinks, yellows and blues on the walls and on the floor. The people depicted have little detail shown in their faces, though in what is shown they look obviously surprised and somewhat condescending in their glance towards the viewer. The vibrant glaring colours reflect modern style. The painting is notable for its absence of shadow; the walls are glowing with bright non-directional light and colour. Everything about the painting seems modern, from trendy green table tops to pinkish and red colours on the chairs and on the walls. Two unusual yellow modern style lamps on the walls have an Art Deco look. The customers wear fur coats with stylish hats, giving an impression that this is a place for respectable, middle-class people. The waitresses wear a bright green colour in keeping with the rest. The chairs have huge backs and tiny legs, reflecting a new modern world of manufactured objects, rather than traditional wooden furniture.
Smith's paintings included arrangements of flowers consisting of daffodils, hippeastrums and waratahs. As part of her personal oeuvre, she painted a work of a dog sleeping called Krinkley Kronks Sleeping in cool purples and oranges, although the actual name of the dog was Rex.
Smith's work featured among that of 50 women in a 2025 exhibition co-presented by Agsa and the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) and entitled 'Dangerously Modern Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890-1940'.
Sydney Harbour Bridge paintings
Her paintings of the Sydney Harbour Bridge as it was being built are some of the best painted at the turn of the century when it was a symbol of what the people of Australia are capable of. Her first paintings of the harbour bridge such as The Bridge in Curve were of the bridge before the actual work on the arms had started, and to disguise this fact she concentrated more on painting the pylons in her earlier paintings of the bridge. She painted the arches as they were approaching one another, liking the tension between the two sides, and did not paint the bridge after it was completed. Though the painting The Bridge in Curve (1930) was rejected from the Society of Artists exhibition in 1930 it is now considered one of Australia's best modernist paintings. It shows the construction work continuing, with cranes fixed over the edges of both sides of the bridge. Her highly detailed drawn study for the painting shows her eye for details and her ability to capture a scene in a photo-realistic manner. Smith did in fact draw the Harbour Bridge completed in Great White Ship at Circular Quay, but here as the title suggests, the focus is more upon the ship in the foreground than the bridge itself.
Second World War