Grace Cossington Smith
Grace Cossington Smith (April 22, 1892 - December 10, 1984) was an Australian artist. Examples of her work are held by every major gallery in Australia.
Most known for her yellowish indoor scenes of doorways and windows and her paintings of the arch of the Sydney Harbour Bridge as it was being built. One of Australia's most important artists of the 20th Century. Many of her scenes give a glimpse of the ordinary suburban home; still lifes and doorways and window sills. She also sometimes painted important events such as the World Wars and the arrival of the Prince of Wales to Sydney which show a broader view of what was happening in Australia and the world at the time.
She uses great sunlight and wonderful patterns of vibrant colour with cool colours added to shadows giving them sense of energy. Using carefully placed brushstrokes of brilliant colour sie by side to build us small squares, she builds form in colour. She was one of the earliest Australian artists to be influenced by European Post-Impressionist movement and lead a break away from Australian Impressionism. Her works were very daring for the time and she is a contemporary of Margaret Preston. Her main interest was colour, bright shimmering colour filled with reflected sunlight. She supported modernism and developed her own individual technique.
Cossington
She lived in a house in Kuringai Avenue, Turramurra, Sydney for most of her life. Her house there on Kur-ring-gai Avenue was named Cossington, same as her middle name, named after her mother's house, Cossington Hall in Leicestershire in England. Her family's first house in Neutral Bay in Sydney was also named Cossington.
First World War
Arriving in Australia back from a holiday to England shortly before the First World War began, Grace supported the war effort. Her painting The sock knitter, of her sister knitting socks for the war effort has sometimes been regarded as the first post-impressionist painting in Australia. The painting shows her sister Madge studiously working away knitting from a ball of yarn which sits delicately to her side. When taken in context of the war, it is a powerful picture of someone working on something small to help a greater cause. Cossington Smith also later drew a series of cartoons, which were satirical and anti-German showing caricatures of German army figures. She also did a drawing of Belgian refugees fleeing the Germans at the start of the war. Her drawings of these wartime figures are much different to the usual style in her work.
Sydney
She painted the city of Sydney, its people, the crowds and places there such as restaurants. 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 from memory to record the actual moment when he passed by, obviously because she did not have time to record what would have taken only a couple of seconds. This painting, The prince, accurately records the scene of the prince being driven in his car through the street, which is lined by a large crowd of people. It shows 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. They show that Sydney was already 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 current fashion.
Turramurra
Her paintings of the area around Turramurra show the development of Sydney in the suburbs. Her street scenes often showed roads going up and down on hills. Her landscapes were often more successful and dynamic where they were based around a road. Her painting Eastern Road, Turramurra shows a road very similar to many of the roads around hilly Turramurra which have many dips and bends in them. Much can be found in this picture which shows the lifestyle of the people at the time; the houses appear more on plots then in suburban yards, with trees only on the side of the road, not near the houses. The painting appears to show a view of a country town or a village, rather than a city, with the outer suburbs of Sydney somewhat rural looking at this time. In the simplicity of form and colours these works look similar to other works by modernist artists at the time.
Modernism
Grace was seen to be painting similarly to the style of Australian modernists in the early 1930s. She primarily painted in her own fashion, trying to avoid outside influences, being disinterested in them anyway. However in exhibitions and discussions with other artists, she must have come under influence in some form or another. Many of her paintings painted around 1932-33 were close to being like the style of contemporary Sydney painters. These paintings show objects being broken down into forms based on their colours similar to Cezanne, and have a cubist manipulation of some of the imagery. Her House with trees, 1935, shows houses being painted in pinks, with unnatural blues for some of the bushes surrounding them. A distortion of the 'real' colours is apparent, and some of the perspective lines of the house may be somewhat off balance with how they might have normally appeared. Her most well known modernist painting is The Lacquer Room, 1935-36, which shows a view over an Art Deco styled cafe called the Soda Fountain, which was at the David Jones department store in Sydney. The work itself is very 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 the modern style. The painting is notable for its absence of shadow; the walls are glowing with bright 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 yellowish modern style of lamps look very Art Deco on the walls. The customers wear fur coats with stylish hats, giving an impression that this is a place for well to do people. The waitresses wear a bright green colour that similarly gives a modern feel. The chairs have huge backs and tiny legs, they reflect a new modern world of manufactured objects, rather than traditional wood furniture.
Other paintings she did of arrangements of flowers, including daffodils, hippeastrums and waratahs. She painted a delightful work of a dog sleeping called Krinkley Kronks sleeping in cool purples and oranges, although Rex was the name of the actual dog.
Sydney Harbour Bridge paintings
Her paintings of the Sydney Harbour Bridge as it was being built are some of the best painted at this time. Her first paintings of the harbour bridge such as The curve of the Bridge, 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. The painting The Bridge in-curve is one of the finest of these bridge paintings, although it was rejected from the Society of Artists exhibition in 1930. It is now considered one of Australia's finest modernist paintings. It shows the construction work continuing, with cranes fixed over the edges of both sides of the bridge. Her drawing study for the painting is almost as detailed as the painting itself, showing her eye for details and her ability to capture a scene in a photo-realistic manner. Cossington 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
As with the First World War, she also depicted the Second world war in various ways. Grace painted images showing the arrival of allied troops in France, a dinner with allied leaders at Yalta, and a mass after the war ended in remembrance of the war. Her painting Church Interior, done in 1941, shows a scene in a church where men are mostly absent, having gone off to the war. Another later church scene, Thanksgiving Service, shows a church with the British Union Jack and the Red Ensign in the background, a celebration of the victory in the war after it had finished. Several of her other paintings show 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 the war, she was a warden, which meant 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 shows a line of people sitting on chairs, looking solemn and possibly chatting quietly. She painted Dawn landing, 1944 which shows troops and a tank disembarking off a ship after the Allied landings in France. An event which marked the end of the enemy occupation in Europe, it was unusual for her to paint this scene which was not something in front of her. Similarly seeming somewhat at odds with the rest of her work, is the painting of Signing 1945, to depict the signing of the peace treaty at Yalta, which shows figures which at the front which are vaguely recognisable as the three allied world leaders. This event must have been very important for her to paint it when she almost always painted scenes from in front of her, rather than a scene of people on the other side of the world. She would probably have been relieved that the war was nearly over.
Landscapes
She painted outdoor scenes, somewhat less successfully than her indoor scenes, but painted outside whenever someone could take her out in the countryside to paint, going on many trips. In her life she visited several towns outside Sydney, as well as visiting the national capital, Canberra. She also painted in the Blue Mountains, and in Moss Vale and Exeter. Beginning in the late 1930s, she started a style which was less influenced by the modernist one, and more to do with the light and colour of Australia, and her own personal interpretation of the landscape. Her paintings show the olive green and sienna colour of the Australian bush, depicted in a style where the brushstrokes are visible, made up of many similar colours. One of her best landscapes was a series of four large paintings she did called Four panels for a screen: loquat tree, gum and wattle trees, waterfall, picnic in the gully#, 1929. The first two panels show the trees in her yard, while the last two show the world further away from her home; a waterfall and people having a picnic with a billycan in a gully. It symbolises the theme and division in her landscape work between her immediate streets and trees, and further away from her home, where her friends and relatives often took her to paint. The four paintings was done on commission, however the commission was refused and because of this Grace would never work on a large commission again.
Overseas
She visited England once with her sister between 1912 and 1914, and returned to Europe later between 1948 and 1951. On her overseas trips, Grace showed a world different to her own, yet gave it her own unique style. On the second trip she became very interested in English architecture, and besides sketches and drawings of cathedrals and buildings, took many photos of indoor doorways and scenes of rooms inside houses. Her many sketchbooks reveal something of her life, because being more loose and personal than larger paintings, they can give more of an insight into the details of the artist's everyday life.
Yellowish Room Interiors
Grace's indoor views show the pleasant aspects of a suburban home in Sydney in the 1950s and 1960s. In these works, her love of the colour yellow is most obvious. She loves the colour because it is the colour of the sun, as well as being religiously significant because yellow is a colour of glory. She also regarded yellow as the colour of the Australian bush, rather than other painters at the time which tended to see the Australian countryside as being more reddish than yellowish. Her paintings explore the perspective, shapes and colours of objects inside seemingly ordinary rooms. They offer a vision of the type of furniture, clothing and other objects which suburban people had in their homes during this time. Drapery, chair and window, 1942 shows what seems at first to be merely a couple of chairs in front of a window, but the viewer is drawn into the wonderful spaces created around these delightful objects, and the folds of the drapery which create a lovely feeling of light and shadows. Increasingly, she would do more of these interior views with ten room paintings exhibited in her solo exhibition of 1947. Her large oil Interior with verandah doors, 1954, shows an accurate depiction of her house with a large window and a door opening to the outside on the other side of the bed. The painting is the first of her larger room interior paintings and prominently features yellow in the colouring. She also experimented with views in mirrors, such as in Interior with wardrobe mirror, 1955, which shows a mirror on an open wardrobe mirror that is at a 45 degree angle, whereby the viewer is given a view of the outside from the reflection in the glass. The angular cutting into the basic composition with these doors adds dynamism and gives it an energetic feel. In all her later paintings, she used a unique style of squarish paint applied on the canvas, in colours which were varied but which tended towards yellowish colours of the spectrum. Many of her room interior paintings show the same room from different angles, or even multiple views from a slightly different or the same angle. Some paintings a door or window is the dominant focus for the painting, while others the viewer gets a look at the entire room. Her use of colour has been compared to the work of Pierre Bonnard, though she said she found Cezanne a more important influence on her. Her style of many multi-coloured brushstrokes was used not only in her interior views, but also in her still lifes.
Later still lifes
Cossington-Smith's later still lifes are works that explore the use of different colours put together giving a unifying feel. She painted many still lifes of fruit, jugs and vases with glimpses of drapery and parts of the room behind. In style, they were made up of the same choppy squarish style of many individual brushstrokes making up the whole, which were varied in colour, yet still gave an overall yellowish feel. She has a striking sense of perspective, and great eye for detail, planting the objects firmly in a three dimensional space. Still life with red vase, 1962, shows a bold red vase contrasted with the background made from its complimentary opposite colour, green, or at least, greenish-yellow. Another jug to the right blends in with the background, while the red jug is firmly planted in the perspective of the table. Still life with white cup and saucer, 1971, one of her last paintings, shows several jugs, green, red and yellow, all given a sense of being very solid objects, with a delightful white cup and saucer nearby. She was very frail after this, being unable to paint any more large works.
Order of Australia medal
For her services to Australian art, the Governor of New South Wales visited her in her nursing home and gave her the Order of Australia medal, in 1983. She passed away the following year.
References
Hart, D. Grace Cossington Smith. 2005, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
James, B. Grace Cossington Smith. 1990, Craftsman House
Thomas, D.Grace Cossington Smith: A life from drawings in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. 1993, NGA, Canberra
Thomas, D.Grace Cossington Smith. 1973, AGNSW, Sydney.