Grace Cossington Smith AO OBE (20 April 1892 – 20 December 1984) was an Australian artist and pioneer of modernist painting in Australia and was instrumental in introducing Post-Impressionism to her home country.

Grace attended Abbotsleigh School for Girls in Wahroonga 1905–09 where Albert Collins and Alfred Coffey took art classes.

After returning to Sydney in 1914 she attended Dattilo Rubbo's painting classes alongside Norah Simpson and took an interest in modernist theories.

[6] She received acclaim late in her career, and in 1973 a major retrospective exhibition of her work toured Australia.

[1] One of Australia's most important artists of the twentieth century, Cossington Smith was best known for her modernist depiction of a Sydney cafeteria, paintings of the arch of the Sydney Harbour Bridge as it was being built, and her late indoor scenes of doorways and windows where yellow is usually the dominant colour.

Many of her scenes give a glimpse of the ordinary suburban home of her time: still lives, doorways and window sills.

In 1920, they moved to what had previously been a Quaker meeting-house, which they also called Cossington, at 43 Ku-Ring-Gai Avenue, Turramurra, where she was to live most of her life.

The painting shows a girl studiously working away, knitting from a ball of yarn which sits delicately by her side.

Other works of the time were a drawing of Belgian refugees fleeing the Germans at the start of the war and one titled Reinforcements: troops marching (c. 1917)[9] which show strong patterns and colour.

Cossington Smith's paintings of the area around Turramurra show the development of Sydney in the northern suburbs.

The painting appears to show a view of a country town or a village, rather than a city, with the outer suburbs of Sydney somewhat rural-looking at this time.

About The Sock Knitter it is said that "The extreme flattening of the picture plane and the use of bright, expressive, broken colour applied in broad brush-strokes to delineate form reflects the aesthetic concerns of European painters such as Cézanne, Matisse and van Gogh.

"[13] Despite these tendencies she became a foundation member of, and exhibited with, Robert Menzies' anti-modernist organisation, the Australian Academy of Art.

These paintings show objects being broken down into forms based on their colours similar to Cézanne, and have a cubist manipulation of some of the imagery.

The Lacquer Room (1936), showing a view across an Art Deco styled café called the Soda Fountain, which was then located in the David Jones department store in Sydney.

The painting is notable for its absence of shadow; the walls are glowing with bright non-directional light and colour.

Everything about the painting seems modern, from trendy green table tops to pinkish and red colours on the chairs and on the walls.

The customers wear fur coats with stylish hats, giving an impression that this is a place for respectable, middle-class people.

The chairs have huge backs and tiny legs, reflecting a new modern world of manufactured objects, rather than traditional wooden furniture.

An event which marked the beginning of the end of the Nazi occupation of Europe, it was unusual for her to paint a scene of something not directly before her.

Beginning in the late 1930s, she started a style which was less influenced by the modernist one, and more to do with the light and colour of Australia, and her own personal interpretation of the landscape.

It symbolises the theme and division in her landscape work between her immediate streets and trees, and further away from her home, where her friends and relatives often took her to paint.

On the second trip she became very interested in English architecture and, besides sketches and drawings of cathedrals and buildings, took many photos of indoor doorways and scenes of rooms inside houses.

In style, they consisted of many individual, choppy, squarish brush strokes making up the whole, varied in colour, but still giving an overall yellowish feel.

She has a striking sense of perspective, and great eye for detail, planting the objects firmly in three-dimensional space.

The Governor of New South Wales visited Cossington Smith in her nursing home to award her the honour.

The Grace Cossington Smith Gallery was opened in Abbotsleigh Senior School on the Pacific Highway, Wahroonga, in 2013.