Lot 9

The Macquarie Galleries, Sydney (label verso)
Christie's, Melbourne, 24 November 1993, lot 152
Private collection
Christie's, Melbourne, 23 November 1998, lot 62
Private collection, Melbourne
Joel Fine Art, Melbourne, 16 October 2006, lot 6
Private collection, Melbourne
Thence by descent

(Possibly) Grace Cossington-Smith, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 3-16 March 1976, cat no. 17

Grace Cossington Smith was one of the most innovative Australian artists of the twentieth century. In the 1940s, many of her peers were painting pure abstraction, whilst the majority of Cossington Smith's subject matter remained still life, interiors, bush and garden scenes and landscapes. For Cossington Smith, the garden and gully outside her studio and around Kuringai Chase provided constant inspiration. So, too, the French Post-Impressionist, Paul Cézanne, informed much of her work especially her landscapes. Of all the painters she admired, Cossington Smith noted that 'there aren't any others that impress me like Cézanne ... I think that he painted what I wanted'. (Interview with Alan Roberts, 1970).
In Bush c.1940, Cossington Smith uses dabs or swatches of pure colour to build up her forms. 'I saw things as a pattern expressed in colour', she stated in 1970. Colour is carefully arranged so as to accentuate the solid towering trees while also maintain the delicacy of atmosphere. It was while she was a student under Dattilo Rubbo, that she was introduced to colour theories, leading her to develop her unique vocabulary of colour that would place her, retrospectively, in the vanguard of modernist art in Australia.

Olivia Fuller
Head of Art