National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Grace Cossington Smith

This work, with its sweeping directional movement of the road through the centre of the picture plane, depicts Eastern Road near the artist’s home in Turramurra at a time when it was still a semi-rural suburb. The watercolour was preceded by a detailed sketchbook drawing with precise colour notations. Cossington Smith told Daniel Thomas that when she was doing her initial drawing she was ‘pleased that a figure came onto the road to animate its emptiness’.

Some of Cossington Smith’s most successful portraits are her tender drawings of family members. Her close bond with her family is evident in her drawings of her father Ernest and her sisters Diddy and Madge, depicted in uncontrived, relaxed poses. In Portrait of Diddy her sister appears meditative, wearing the artist’s favourite colour, yellow. As she said: ‘Yellow is the colour of the sun’. This work was in an extremely fragile condition and is being shown for the first time since entering the Gallery’s collection, thanks to the dedicated efforts of the Gallery’s conservators.

Grace COSSINGTON SMITH, Orchestral concert: Dr Sargent conducting in the Sydney Town Hall c.1939, oil,pencil, pen and ink on cardboard on composition board, 45.9 (h) x 41.0 (w) cm. Collection of the National Gallery of Australia

Cossington Smith said of her painting Interior in yellow: ‘The subject took me very much. It is a room with a wardrobe and a bed and carpet but the chief thing to me was the yellow walls…the whole thing is meant to express an interior with light…the sunlight did not come in in a definite way but the whole room seemed to be full of light, which is what I want to do more than the actual sunlight. I feel that even the shadows are a subdued light and they must have light in them as well as the light parts.’ (Interview with Hazel de Berg, 1965, National Library of Australia)

Grace COSSINGTON SMITH, Interior with verandah doors 1954, oil on composition board, 76.2 (h) x 91.0 (w) cm, signed and dated l.l., black oil paint "G. Cossington Smith 54".Collection of the National Gallery of Australia. Bequest of Lucy Swanton 1982

The panels of this magnificent screen depict subjects from the artist’s garden and surrounding bush landscape. Cossington Smith was especially pleased with the third panel. As she said in an interview with Alan Roberts: ‘There used to be a waterfall along there … called Lovers’ Leap … a lovely proper one … and I did a painting … with the length of the waterfall on the panel … I think it came off rather well; rocks and waterfall and the bush.’ This screen was commissioned by a collector in the United Kingdom who rejected it and acquired The gully instead. At the time the artist was disappointed and vowed never to do another commission. Many years later she was delighted when the work was acquired by the National Gallery of Australia.

Grace COSSINGTON SMITH, Dawn landing 1944, oil on pulpboard, 69.5 (h) x 54.3 (w) cm, Sir James and Lady Cruthers Collection, Perth

Among Cossington Smith’s most remarkable paintings are those of the South Coast of New South Wales at Thirroul and Bulli. Undertaken after the death of her beloved mother, who had been ill for some time, they convey a mesmerising transcendent dimension. The brushmarks are immensely varied: square, angular, feathery and delicately stippled. These works are about continuity in nature and continuity of the spirit. In the waves of movement radiating outwards and the undercurrents of complex feeling, these works are intensely personal and spiritual.

Grace COSSINGTON SMITH, The sock knitter 1915, oil on canvas, 61.6 (h) x 50.7 (w) cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales Purchased 1960 © Art Gallery New South Wales

Reinforcements: Troops marching conveys a sense of ritual and occasion. It represents a farewell to the volunteers going off to fight in the First World War. Flags flutter above the buildings and women with their backs to us wave in support. A small child in the foreground breaks free from the crowd and cries in what could be seen as a symbolic loss of innocence. It is an early example of the artist’s work in which vibrant colour, rhythm and pattern are combined with emotive content.