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)