[2] According to the National Gallery of Australia, Smith painted The Bridge in Curve, which is based on drawings made at Milsons Point on the North Shore, during an important phase of her career as an artist, when the importance of colour and the application of paint in small strokes gave her paintings a "brilliant vitality".

A Royal Commission reported on the potential for a link in 1909, and ground was finally broken on the 28 July 1923.

September 1926 saw the completion of the piers that would support the spans approaching the arch.

[4] The painting was only purchased for the National Gallery of Victoria in 1967,[1] which has been criticised as indicative of the neglect of Cossington Smith's work.

[6] Others have provided fuller descriptions of the painting' [It] integrates earth-bound realities with the sweeping, soaring movement of the forming bridge structure, curving across the land and into the sky, the two cranes a bit like Brancusi birds, perched on the edge of possibility.