Grace Cossington-Smith

Grace Cossington Smith AO OBE (22 April 1892 – 10 December 1984) was an Australian artist and pioneer of modernist painting in Australia and was instrumental in introducing Post-Impressionism to her home country. Examples of her work are held by every major gallery in Australia.

'Ille terrarum mihi praeter omnes Angulus ridet'

Sunny morning: cows at Lanyon c.1916

Winchester Cathedral

The bridge in curve 1926

Smith'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 loved 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 who tended to see the Australian countryside as being more reddish than yellowish.

Grace Cossington-Smith: A Retorspective Exhibitionith - National Gallery of Australia