Grace Cossington Smith (right) with her sister Diddy, dog Rex (Krinkley Konks), brother Gordon, father Ernest and young niece Ann (Mills) at Cossington, in Turramurra.
Grace Cossington Smith’s niece Ann Mills at Cossington, the Turramurra home where the artist lived most of her adult life and created vast body of work.
Grace Cossington Smith was an Australian artist. She created her artworks in the style of Post-Impressionism. Smith drew her subject matter from the well-known surroundings of her home and her experience of Sydney city life, which she transformed into vibrant images of light-infused colour.
Background
Smith was born in Neutral Bay, New South Wales, Australia, on April 20, 1892. She was the second of five children of Ernest Smith, a London-born crown solicitor, and his wife Grace, née Fisher, a daughter of the rector of Cossington in Leicestershire. She was a sister of Gordon and Diddy Smith. Ernest Smith's brother was private chaplain to Queen Victoria at Osborne, Isle of Wight, while his sister was an Anglican nun. The well-knit family moved from Sydney to Thornleigh around 1890, where Grace Smith was later born.
Education
Grace Smith attended Abbotsleigh School for Girls in Wahroonga between 1905 and 1909 where she studied under the direction of Albert Collins and Alfred Coffey. During 1910-1911 she studied drawing with Antonio Dattilo Rubbo. From 1912 to 1914 she lived in Winchester, England with her aunt where she attended drawing classes as well as classes at Stettin in Germany and was exposed to paintings by Watteau in Berlin.
After her return to Sydney in 1914, Smith took painting lessons from Dattilo Rubbo alongside Roland Wakelin and Roy de Maistre and became interested in modernist theories.
Career
The Sock Knitter, a portrait in oils created in 1915, was the first truly modernist work by an Australian artist. It was followed by a series of family portraits and interiors, as well as light-filled landscapes, including Sunny Morning: Cows at Lanyon (1916). Soon she also started to paint urban scenes, and although with her patrician outlook she found crowds highly disturbing, she captured the anxiety spirit of the times in her breathtaking images like Strike (1917), Unrest (1920) and Crowd (1922).
In 1920 the house at Turramurra was purchased by the Smiths and renamed Cossington. The same year, at her mother's suggestion, Grace adopted the name Grace Cossington Smith. While the members of her family perceived her as a ladylike amateur, her fellow modernist painters, especially Roy de Maistre and Roland Wakelin, greatly respected her art.
She started to exhibit her artworks, sending paintings to the annual exhibitions of the Royal Art Society of New South Wales from 1915, the Society of Artists from 1919 and the Contemporary Group from 1927. Her first personal exhibition was held in 1928 at the Grosvenor Galleries, then, from 1932 to 1971, every three or four years she had solo exhibitions at the Macquarie Galleries.
During this period, the artist continued to paint interiors and still life, with such remarkable examples as Things on an Iron Tray on the Floor (1927-1928) and drawings of her favourite native wildflowers consisting of daffodils, hippeastrums and waratahs. However, in the mid-1930s her works became for a time more stylized, for instance, in the landscape Govett’s Leap (1933) and The Lacquer Room (1935), her striking painting of an Art Deco styled café called the Soda Fountain, which was then located in the David Jones department store in Sydney. These artworks reflected the common interests of those of other contemporary painters. They showed objects being broken down into forms based on their colours similar to Cézanne, and had a cubist manipulation of some of the imagery.
But it was in her later paintings, from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, that she reached her full maturity. Her works during this period were greatly influenced by the Second World War. For example, she created pictures showing the arrival of allied troops in France, a dinner with allied leaders in Yalta, and a mass after the war ended in remembrance of the war. Several of her other artworks showed large British flags, reflecting not only her own British heritage and patriotism, but also the fact that many Australians still thought of themselves as being part of the British Empire at this time.
During World War II, Grace Cossington Smith served as a warden. She was in charge of getting people out of the houses in Kur-ring-gai Avenue if there was any trouble. She depicted a meeting of wardens in the painting Wardens' Meeting (1943), which showed a line of people sitting on chairs, looking solemn and possibly chatting quietly. Dawn Landing (1944) showed troops and a tank disembarking from a ship after the Allied landings in France.
She painted numerous outdoor scenes, which, however, were less successful than her indoor scenes. But painted outside whenever someone could take her out in the countryside, going on many trips. In her lifetime, she visited several towns outside Sydney, and also visited the national capital, Canberra. She painted in the Blue Mountains, and in Moss Vale and Exeter.
After a visit to Europe in 1949-1950 and the death of her sister she lived alone with her work centred on home and memories. In the 1950s, Smith produced a series of astonishing domestic interiors alive with diffused light - works such as Interior with Wardrobe Mirror (1955), Studio Door I (1956), Open Door (1960) and Interior in Yellow (1962-1964).
She became widely known in the 1960s after Bernard Smith's Australian Painting was published. In 1973 a retrospective exhibition was mounted at the Art Gallery of New South Wales that then toured Australia. In all her later paintings Grace Smith used a unique style of squarish daubs of paint applied on the canvas, in colours which were different but which tended towards the yellow end of the spectrum. Among her later artworks were Still life with red vase (1962), Still life with white cup and saucer (1971).
Grace Cossington Smith was a pioneer of modernist painting in Australia and was instrumental in introducing Post-Impressionism to her home country. Several of Smith's paintings were sold at auctions and the highest price fetched was $41,400 for Wildflowers (1938).
In 1973 the artist was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). For her services to Australian art, Smith was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1983.
To commemorate her achievements, the Grace Cossington Smith Gallery was opened in Abbotsleigh Senior School on the Pacific Highway, Wahroonga, in 2013. The gallery constantly holds different exhibitions throughout the year. On the second floor is the Year 12 art studio, where Higher School Certificate students study the arts.
Although some of the pivotal artworks are in private collections, major galleries and museums around Australia have considerable holdings. For instance, the Art Gallery of New South Wales holds a large number of her works, including The Sock Knitter (1915), Reinforcements: Troops Marching (c.1917), Rushing (1922), Things on an Iron Tray on the Floor (1927-1928), The Lacquer Room (1935-1936) and Interior with Wardrobe Mirror (1955).
The Australian National Gallery in Canberra also has a large collection, including The Cabbage Garden (1919), Eastern Road, Turramurra (c.1926), Interior with Verandah (1954) and Interior in Yellow (1962-1964).
Other paintings are spread widely around the country, including such places as the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Queensland Art Gallery, the Newcastle Regional Art Gallery and the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery. There are also Cossington Smiths in the collections of the Western Australian Art Gallery, Wollongong City Art Gallery, the Tasmanian Museum in Hobart, Shepparton Art Gallery, the University of Sydney, James Cook University in Townsville, Fairfax Newspapers and Mosman Municipality.
Smith remained a devout Anglican throughout her life.
Views
Grace Smith was imbued with the ideals of public service and independence of mind. She acknowledged the big simple things in life: love, politics and religion.
Quotations:
"All form - landscape, interiors, still life, flowers, animals, people - has an inarticulate grace and beauty; painting to me is expressing this form in colour, colour vibrant with light - but containing this other, silent quality which is unconscious, and belongs to all things created."
"My chief interest, I think, has always been colour, but not flat crude colour, it must be colour within colour, it has to shine; light must be in it."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Ethel Anderson: "Her [Grace Cossington Smith] wholly original technique, seems to have grown, quite naturally, out of her efforts to give these moments their adequate expression in paint."
Philip Bacon: "She [Grace Cossington Smith] is one of the artists whose values were affected. But that represents a very good opportunity for collectors now."
Philip Bacon: "It’s the quality of her [Grace Cossington Smith's] work that makes it such a bargain for art lovers. She had a vision that people really respond to."
Interests
Artists
Paul Cézanne
Connections
Grace Cossington Smith never married.
Father:
Ernest Smith
Mother:
Grace Smith (Fisher)
Sister:
Diddy Smith
Brother:
Gordon Smith
niece:
Ann Mills
References
Stravinsky's Lunch
Stravinsky's Lunch tells the stories of two extraordinary women, both born close to the turn of the century in Australia and both destined to make important contributions to Australian painting, Stella Bowen and Grace Cossington Smith.
