Elder Wing of Australian Art: Audio Described Tour
Work 12 of 15

In the late 1920s, Grace Cossington Smith saw the path she must follow in a clear light. After several shifts in direction as an artist, she began to invest her paintings with the luminosity of colour and light and the rhythmic patterning of brushstrokes that would define her as one of Australia’s most accomplished modernist painters.
She would later say: ‘My chief interest, I think, has always been colour, but not flat crude colour – it must be colour within colour, it has to shine. Light must be in it.’

After studying art and drawing in Sydney and briefly in Britain, Cossington Smith lived for most of her life at her family’s home at Turramurra in northern Sydney. Her subjects often reflected a world within close proximity – room interiors, her garden and flowers picked from it. In the mid to late 1920s, the roads across the rolling semi-rural terrain of Turramurra were also a repeated subject of her paintings.

Landscape at Pentecost, a scene barely 500 metres from her home, is one such work. In this painting from 1929, Cossington Smith applies distinct colour in short, sharp strokes – what she later called ‘firm, separate notes of clear unworried paint’. She foregrounds the rich orange-brown shades and textures of a dirt road through a hilltop cutting, before the line of her rutted road draws our eye across the assorted green hues of crops and pasture, towards the purple-blue of faraway hills. Above, a heaven of rolling clouds reflects the tones of the colourscape below.

Cossington Smith’s road guides us to a distant horizon and, in doing so, it presents a vision of hope and promise. With its emphasis on colour and light through staccato brushstrokes, Landscape at Pentecost affirms the direction she has chosen at a crossroad period in her career and heralds the radiant, almost spiritual luminosity of the work she would create from then on. Her road of earthy bold orange transports us beyond her home soil, beyond the backyard studio where she painted, into her future of emotively vibrant colour.

Landscape at Pentecost by Australian artist Grace Cossington Smith is a landscape format oil painting on paperboard. Painted in 1929, it is 83.7 cm high and 111.8 cm wide.

Paperboard is a material similar to paper but thicker and rigid with a slightly patterned surface.

Painted in a modernist style, the scene is created with coloured geometric shapes. Each shape filled in with small vertical, horizontal or diagonal strokes of paint.

The viewpoint of the painting is from a road at the top of a hill in a rural landscape. The road continues into the distance, with green paddocks either side and a cloudy sky above.

In the lower third of the painting irregular shaped triangles and rectangles, create a patchwork of muddy browns and red, representing the dirt of the road. Wavy vertical and diagonal lines of darker brown represent the gutter, bumps and hollows of the road, made by wheels and water erosion.

The road has been cut into the hill creating mounds of dirt on either side in the lower left and centre right of the painting.

The mound on the left is covered with a cluster of small curved green shapes, the leaves of roadside vegetation. The mound on the right is covered with grass, horizontal lines of green, yellow and brown create its longer, lower, curved form. A white signpost sits atop this mound.

The brown road runs down into a valley disappearing into the distant hills in the centre of the painting. Two white lines curve along the road, the wheel-tracks of vehicles.

Either side of the road are paddocks, slightly higher topography on the left sloping down to the right.

Rectangles and squares of green, patterned with small vertical lines, are patchworked together to represent the different crops being grown. Vertical brown lines, each topped with green ovals are trees that dot the landscape.

In the upper left are small square houses and farm buildings, and an orchard of fruit trees.

In the centre of the painting, positioned close to the right side of the road are another two small houses. One pink with a yellow roof and white windows. The other brown with a red roof, black windows and two chimneys. Simple squares and triangles patterned with tiny strokes of paint, represent their brick work and corrugated rooves. A grey stone fence encircles the yellow house.

The cloud-filled sky, layered white, grey and pink rectangular shapes edged with blue lie horizontally across the upper third of the painting like the folds in a fluffy quilt.

Between the clouds above and the green paddocks below, is the horizon of distant hills and valleys in blue and purple.

The painting is signed, and incorrectly dated in the lower left corner, ‘G. Cossington Smith 35’.