DETAIL: Grace COSSINGTON SMITH,  'Interior in yellow', 1964, oil on composition board, National Gallery of Australia
 
 
Grace COSSINGTON SMITH | Landscape with flowering peach

 
COSSINGTON SMITH, Grace
Australia 1892 – Australia 1984
UK, Europe 1912-14; UK, Italy 1949-51
Landscape with flowering peach c.1932
oil on canvas on board
58.5 (h) x 72.5 (w) cm
Shepparton Art Gallery, purchased 1976
VIEW: Article |

Cossington Smith was fascinated by the emotional impact of colour. Although she was not directly influenced by Chinese art or culture, Landscape with flowering peach recalls a passage from a text on colour by Beatrice Irwin that she transcribed. ‘One has only to stand on a Chinese hillside in April, and absorb the rainbow effect of pale green rice fields against miles of cherry and peach bloom, delicately fringed with golden millet, to feel even in one’s own superficially attuned organism a reflex of the calm and penetration that characterises Chinese life and literature’. (Beatrice Irwin, New Science of colour, first published in 1916)

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