Grace Cossington Smith

Biography

In 1930 the Society of Artists turned down Grace Cossington Smith’s painting “The Bridge in Curve” for its exhibition. It shows Sydney Harbour Bridge being built, with cranes hanging over the edges of both its halves. She was drawn to the tension between the two converging sides of the arch, and she never painted the finished bridge: it does appear in the drawing “Great White Ship at Circular Quay”, but there the ship is the main subject. The rejected canvas is now regarded as one of the finest modernist paintings in Australia.

She was born in 1892 in the Sydney suburb of Neutral Bay, the second of five children of Ernest Smith, a London-born solicitor, and his wife Grace, née Fisher, daughter of the rector of Cossington in Leicestershire. Both family homes, the first in Neutral Bay and the one the Smiths moved to in 1920, were called Cossington, after Cossington Hall, her mother’s childhood home. The second, a former Quaker meeting house on Ku-Ring-Gai Avenue in Turramurra, became her home for almost her whole life; it is now heritage-listed. In that same year, 1920, Grace Smith took Cossington as her middle name.

From 1905 to 1909 she attended Abbotsleigh School for Girls in Wahroonga, where drawing was taught by Albert Collins and Alfred Coffey, and in 1910–1911 she took drawing lessons from Antonio Dattilo Rubbo. From 1912 to 1914 she and her sister lived in England with an aunt in Winchester; she attended drawing classes there, also studied in Stettin in Germany, and in Berlin saw Watteau. Back in Sydney in 1914, she returned to Dattilo Rubbo, this time to his painting class, where together with Norah Simpson she took up modernist theories. In 1915 came “The Sock Knitter”: her sister knitting socks for the soldiers at the front. The space of the picture is strongly flattened, the form built up with broad strokes of bright, broken colour, and in this people see echoes of Cézanne, Matisse and Van Gogh. In the same war years she drew satirical anti-German cartoons, Belgian refugees fleeing the Germans, and the marching columns of “Reinforcements: troops marching” (about 1917). From 1915 she exhibited with the Royal Art Society of New South Wales, from 1919 with the Society of Artists, in 1926–1928 with Thea Proctor’s Contemporary Group, and from 1932 to 1971 at the Macquarie Galleries. Her work was highly regarded by Roland Wakelin and Roy de Maistre.

She usually painted what was before her eyes, and she went into the city with a sketchbook, though she was shy of drawing in public.

When the Prince of Wales came to Sydney in 1920, she went into the city, sketched the buildings around her, and painted the moment his car passed from memory. That was how “The Prince” (1920) came about, followed by “Rushing” (about 1922), in which a crowd hurries down the street and one woman looks straight at the viewer in surprise. In 1929 she painted four large panels for a screen on commission, with a loquat tree, gum and wattle trees, a waterfall and a picnic in a gully, but the client turned them down, and she never took on a large commission again. Her mother died in 1931 and her father in 1938, and Grace became head of the household; since 1914 she had worked in a small studio hut in the garden beyond the tennis lawn, and now a large, well-lit studio was added to the house next to her bedroom.

Her best-known painting, perhaps, “The Lacquer Room” (1936), is hard to forget: an Art Deco café in the David Jones department store, pink, yellow and blue walls, green tables, chairs with huge backs and tiny legs, ladies in furs and hats. There are no shadows on the canvas at all. Oddly enough, she became a founding member of Robert Menzies’ anti-modernist Australian Academy of Art and exhibited with it.

During the Second World War she served as a civil defence warden for her street and painted “Wardens’ Meeting” (1943), and also, unusually for her, events she had not witnessed: the Allied landings in France (“Dawn Landing”, 1944) and the signing of the agreement at Yalta (“Signing”, 1945). In 1948–1951 she visited Europe again, drew English cathedrals and photographed doorways and rooms inside houses. Rooms became her main subject: her solo exhibition of 1947 already included ten interiors, and “Interior with verandah doors” (1954) began a series of large canvases in which her own bedroom, the window and the open door are painted in square strokes and everything leans towards yellow. In “Interior with wardrobe mirror” (1955) the yard behind the house is seen only in reflection. Her colour was compared to Bonnard’s, but she herself felt that Cézanne had mattered more to her. It seems to me that these late rooms are the best things she painted.

“Still life with white cup and saucer” (1971) was one of her last paintings; after it she painted no more large works. Recognition came late: in 1973 a major retrospective toured Australia, the same year she was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, in 1983 an Officer of the Order of Australia, and the Governor of New South Wales came to her in person to present the award. Grace Cossington Smith died on 20 December 1984 in Roseville, New South Wales.