Deutscher and Hackett

After April 1931 when her brother Gordon married Mary Yarwood, Grace Cossington Smith would often holiday at ‘Apolima’ the Yarwood family home at Exeter, south of Moss Vale.

‘From the late 1930s and into the 1940s Cossington Smith did numerous pastel drawings and paintings of the landscape in the Southern Highlands, including Moss Vale landscape and Near Exeter 1947 [the painting on offer]. These works reveal a distinct change in palette when compared with the vivid colours of her earlier paintings, moving towards muted tones of browns, ochres and dusky greens...Some of these works do lack the taut compositions of earlier paintings, although at times the loss of structure is compensated for by a different appreciation of light in the shimmering heat haze of summer. The works shown in Cossington Smith’s solo exhibitions and in group shows during these years predominantly included landscapes painted on the spot while on excursions with her friends Enid Cambridge, Helen Stewart and Treania Smith [also the co-owner of Macquarie Galleries from 1938] ...While in the bush Cossington Smith often adopted Cezanne’s strategy of stalking the motif in nature and meditating on it for long periods... In 1939 seven paintings by Cezanne had been included in the [Herald] exhibition French and British Contemporary Art, which toured Australia...She later said that of all the painters she admired, including Van Gogh and Pierre Bonnard ‘there aren’t any others that impress me like Cezanne...In the context of the bush paintings it is worth noting that when asked in 1970 which Australian artists she most responded to, Cossington Smith replied that she liked Fred Williams very much ( a younger artist with a passion for Cezanne’s work) because of his feeling and expression.’ ¹

1. Hart, D., Grace Cossington Smith, National Gallery of Australia, 2005,pp. 61-62, citing information sourced from James, B., Grace Cossington Smith, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1990, p. 111