Grace Cossington Smith was a Sydney painter, born in Neutral Bay, who lived for sixty-five years in the family home in Turramurra. She took drawing lessons with Antonio Dattilo Rubbo in 1910, and discussed contemporary art with studio visitors such as Margaret Preston and Roy de Maistre. George Lambert and Thea Proctor also encouraged the experimentalism of her early works, such as the important painting The Sock Knitter, exhibited in 1915. Early in her career Smith loved to paint landscapes and flowers on excursions with friends and family. In the late 1920s and early 30s, she completed a major series of works showing the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, with the arching metal as a symbol of modernism. As she grew older, she concentrated on intimate paintings of rooms in her house, in which she tried to express forms with colour and light: ‘colour within colour, it has to shine’.

More: Portrait of a Modernist.