Profiles of Popular and Emerging Australian Artists – Grace Cossington-Smith

Grace Cossington-Smith 1892-1984

• Born in Neutral Bay, Sydney, New South Wales
• Educated in Sydney and began studying with painter Antonio Dattilo Rubbo in Sydney in 1910
• Travelled to Europe in 1912 to attend Winchester School of Art in England, then Stettin in Germany (now part of Poland)
• Studied European modern art with Rubbo on her return
• Recent sales: Artworks are usually sold in the tens of thousands over the past few years, ranging from around $10,000 to $40,000. There have been notable exceptions with ‘Jug with Fruit in the Window’ fetching $638,182 at auction in July 2020.

Grace Cossington Smith is regarded as one of the most important Australian artists of the twentieth century. She had a particular style that was brightly coloured and influenced by impressionist art, using patterns of colour side by side to create form, shadow and movement.

Many of her works are of Sydney life, showing the architecture and crowds of a bustling city, her paintings of the Sydney Harbour Bridge under construction, becoming particularly well known in later years. She also depicted many ordinary objects in domestic scenes, emphasizing the play of light through the careful placement of colour.

Her works were considered audacious and modern at the time she painted, and there was significant censure of her style in the media. But she was a confident and daring artist who was not afraid to follow her own way. Deborah Hart, senior curator at the National Gallery of Australia in 2005 states that ‘by the late 1920s, she just knew that colour was the thing that she was really on about, and she went for it… She did get a lot of criticism in the press, but she was very bold and she knew what she wanted.’1

Grace continued painting into her seventies and produced many still-lifes. These reflected her ‘striking sense of perspective, and great eye for detail..’2, continuing to use carefully arranged colour to produce vivid images.

1. Sydney Morning Herald, smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/modern-message-from-the-extreme-end-of niceness-20050303-gdkuh2.html
2. Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Cossington_Smith