Grace Cossington-Smith

Recognised as one of Australia’s most distinctive early modernists, Grace Cossington Smith produced paintings that hum with palpable pictorial energy and glow with luminous hue. Her chief passion was colour, not flat crude colour but colour within colour, light shining from within, achieved through mosaic-like blocks of pigment laid down in rhythmic arrangements that shimmer and radiate. Her early masterwork The Sock Knitter, 1915 is cited as Australia’s first modern painting, and her iconic images of the Sydney Harbour Bridge under construction in the 1920s remain among the most memorable works in Australian art.

Studying alongside Roy de Maistre and Roland Wakelin at Antonio Dattilo-Rubbo’s atelier during World War One, Cossington Smith was deeply influenced by Post-Impressionism, particularly Cézanne, as well as the colour theories of Beatrice Irwin. Living her entire adult life at the family home in Turramurra, she found an endless range of subjects in her immediate surroundings, from the streets and bush of her neighbourhood to the domestic interiors and still lifes that became a major focus of her later work. Today her paintings are held in every major institution in Australia, with the National Gallery of Australia alone holding over 1,700 works.