Grace Cossington Smith - National Gallery of Australia

LANDSCAPE
Grace Cossington Smith
Eastern Road, Turramurra c. 1926
watercolour over pencil on paperboard
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Bequest of Mervyn Horton 1984
Many of Grace Cossington Smith’s landscapes from the 1920s were painted near her home in the
beautiful, elevated, semi-rural North Shore suburb of Turramurra. The subject of this work, Eastern
Road, was close to Cossington Smith’s family home and the sharp decline and rise of the road
offered her the chance to create this vertiginous composition of sweeping space and distant,
oblique horizon.
This watercolour was developed from a pencil sketch in which she
worked out the composition in great detail. Cossington Smith was a
very deliberate artist; her drawings were made in front of the object
and colour notes made on the margin. The drawings are quite specifi c
and correspond closely to the recommendations of Beatrice Irwin,
who had written the book New Science of colour. Irwin suggested
that colours are imbued with certain properties, for example, olive
green (sedative), rose madder, fawn, royal blue and emerald green
(recuperative), and violet and chrome (stimulative). The squared
drawing was then carefully transferred to the larger support and
the watercolour applied according to the notes on the preparatory
drawing.
Study for Eastern Road, Turramurra
Visual analysis
c. 1926 pencil on paper
sketchbook 10 National Gallery of
The strong diagonal of the road sweeps towards the centre of the
Australia, Canberra
painting and then curves upwards towards the oblique horizon. On Purchased 1976
either side the foreground intersects the sky via the large, framing green
trees. The largest telegraph pole leans towards the left and this angle is emphasised by the three
close-cropped sticks in the foreground. Note that the telephone lines do not continue back into the
work (and do not appear at all on the right-hand side), as they would have made the composition
too complex.
The verticality of the trees, poles and road is counterbalanced by many curving horizontal lines of
the fi elds, trees and houses. The glowing curves of the sky lighten towards the horizon. The colour
red is used almost like punctuation across the composition, attracting the eye from one side of
the road to the other. A horse and cart, steamroller and distant person on the road enliven the
composition and serve to create a sense of distance.
Discussion point
•Discuss the role of colour theory and the role of drawing in the work of Grace Cossington Smith.