Did Grace Cossington Smith Read Virginia Woolf?

Did Grace Cossington Smith read Virginia Woolf? It’s a question that has niggled me for years. The art history profession tends to talk of visual art as if it is an insular, self-absorbed activity with the only direct creative influences coming from other visual works. Paintings are shown to beget more paintings. But artists not only go to exhibitions. They listen to music, they watch movies and television, they attend various forms of theatre performance, and they read magazines and books, sometimes even novels touching on art. It was always this way. Arthur Streeton and Fred McCubbin pounced on Trilby when it appeared—we know this from their letters—while Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker devoured The Horse’s Mouth. Literature sat in the imaginative background, shaping the context in which Australian art was historically made. So it is surely not unreasonable to speculate whether Grace Cossington Smith read at least a little of Virginia Woolf. The artist was raised in a book-loving home—her family’s bookshelves included assorted classics, English and German poetry and novels, even Tolstoy and Ibsen—and it is not far-fetched to wonder if any of Woolf’s fiction left an impression on those striking paintings.

The most likely candidate is To the Lighthouse, which was greeted with a chorus of praise when it was published in 1927 and swiftly became Woolf’s most popular and widely read work. Informed by the novelist’s friendship with several painters, it features in the character of Lily Briscoe the most credible depiction of a practising modern artist to appear in early twentieth-century English fiction. Woolf embodies in this character one of the talented modern women who, often through force of circumstance, found themselves “singled out”, to use the 1920s euphemism for women without husbands. A spinster, living at home and looking after an elderly parent, while trying to make her way in a narrow, masculine-controlled world (“Women can’t paint, women can’t write,” harps young Mr Tansley)—the similarities between the fictional Briscoe and the real Cossington Smith are hard to ignore.

Lily Briscoe is unmarriageable because she isn’t pretty, others in the novel repeatedly suggest, much being made of a “little puckered face” and “Chinese eyes”. However, when we look directly into her thoughts, readers find she has made a conscious decision to pursue art and not to pair off: in relationships men take while women give, the painter later muses, and that is not the life for her. One is put in mind of Woolf’s point in her later essay “Professions for Women” that a woman must “kill the angel in the house” to become a professional, that is, she must reject the role of homemaker who sacrifices herself to the wants and whims of others. Briscoe has consciously chosen to be a painter, with the final part of To the Lighthouse exploring how she finds fulfilment in that pursuit, as against the first part of the novel which attentively details the perspective of the compulsive homemaker Mrs Ramsay. Notably, that early part is titled “The Window”, the suggestion being that Mrs Ramsay passively faces the world from inside sheltered domesticity; whereas the latter part centring on the mentally alert Lily Briscoe is called “To the Lighthouse”, with Woolf having the external light beam sweep over all things, probing details, illuminating the hidden and unseen in house and garden. Described later as an “eye opening and shutting”, that all-seeing light becomes a metaphor for the quiet, watchful artist gazing in from her outside position. (On the beach, the carefree Minta Doyle gets the youngsters chanting the refrain of a popular song, “damn your eyes, damn your eyes”.)

Cossington Smith may well have stayed single by choice, although she was of the generation beset by a shortage of marriageable males due to the Great War. Either way, as the art historian and curator Daniel Thomas wrote of barriers she confronted on Sydney’s inter-war art scene, there were consequences to her decision. This was when society patronisingly viewed painting classes for young ladies as equivalent to a finishing school, not the pathway to a feasible career. Cossington Smith was annoyed by ingrained prejudices, much being conveyed by a letter on her visit to a Hilda Rix Nicholas exhibition in 1919: “One old thick-headed pig said, ‘not bad for a woman’!!”, she fumed. Acquaintances initially viewed her own 1920s work as an innocent hobby, while chauvinist males in the Society of Artists regarded the capable modernist as an irritating amateur. Actually, the influential exhibiting group closed ranks against her for over thirty years—“I was very downcast,” she recalled in 1970, “because everything I put into the Society of Artists [exhibitions] was thrown out”—and would not accept her as a full member until 1947.

Likewise, aside from the gentleman botanist Mr Bankes, everyone in Woolf’s novel treats Lily Briscoe’s vocation as a harmless diversion which keeps her occupied. There are no meaningful discussions about culture around the dinner table, just patronising snipes at women painters and writers. And if Mrs Ramsay is momentarily captivated by the colours and forms of fruit in a bowl, she deliberately hangs a green cashmere shawl across the picture in the sitting room, pressing the point that this circle does not take art seriously. Mrs Ramsay is short-sighted, we learn. Not surprisingly, other characters roll up and gawk should Briscoe start to paint or draw, which leads her to think twice whenever she notices something worth visually exploring. Pictures do not proceed in the unsympathetic atmosphere. 

To ask if Grace Cossington Smith was conscious of this novel seems a rhetorical question, because To the Lighthouse was obligatory reading for aspiring modernists in Britain and its dominions. Drusilla Modjeska has profitably employed Woolf’s story to muse over the situation of Australian women artists at the time. Woolf was intimate with progressive figures on London’s art scene: her sister Vanessa Bell (who designed the novel’s jacket), Duncan Grant, Dora Carrington, Roger Fry (Woolf would later write his biography), Dorothy Brett, Walter Sickert. That she knew these individuals and how they looked at things influences the painterly qualities of Woolf’s fiction, an empathy for pictures flavouring her descriptions. So to read To the Lighthouse, with its overt focus on painting, was to connect with certain interests then current in English modernist circles. The novel may be absent from historical studies of modern Australian art, but it was keenly read here over the late 1920s and 1930s.

For today’s reader the discussion of the creative process, if well handled, is much as expected. Art for Lily Briscoe is firmly anchored in balance, careful design and formal values: “that line there, that mass there”, she thinks when musing on a potential subject. Painting involves a process of visual abbreviation, she demonstrates to Mr Bankes, with a sitting figure being simplified to a “triangular purple shape”. This approach was synonymous with Woolf’s friend and sometime mentor Roger Fry, who argued for the primacy of “structural design”, and her brother-in-law Clive Bell, who coined the buzz term “Significant Form”. Still, the passages in Woolf’s novel describing the painter at work translate theory into practice in a most persuasive manner, presenting a compelling case for the then modern method: 

Where to begin?—that was the question; at what point to make the first mark? One line placed on canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex … With a curious physical sensation, as if she were urged forward and at the same time must hold herself back, she made her first decisive stroke. The brush descended. It flickered brown over the white canvas; it left a running mark. A second time she did it—a third time. And so pausing and flickering, she attained a dancing rhythmical movement, as if the pauses were one part of the rhythm, and the strokes another, and all were related; and so, lightly and swiftly pausing, striking, she scored her canvas with brown running nervous lines which had no sooner settled there than they enclosed (she felt it looming out of her) a space.  

More is involved here than mere composition. Because as she works, the fictional painter mentally shifts out of the teeming world: 

Here she was again, she thought, stepping back to look at it, drawn out of gossip, out of living, out of community with people into the presence of this formidable ancient enemy of hers—this other thing, this truth, this reality, which suddenly laid hands on her, emerged stark at the back of appearances and commanded her attention. She was half unwilling, half reluctant. Why always be drawn out and haled away?  

Then, as she labours at her easel, Lily Briscoe confronts and grapples with existence. Breaking off to take stock of the developing picture, “the old question … paused over her, darkened over her. What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with the years.” Woolf sets a contrast here between the seemingly diminutive woman painter and the male academics Mr Ramsay and Mr Tansley, both philosophers. Their endless conversation is just superficial chatter (one gossips about David Hume’s girth; the other, the cost of living) as against her silent paintings which penetrate surfaces, and struggle to find “truth”.

Artistic vision is akin to a religious vision. Take when the painter contemplates a couple on the beach: 

And, suddenly the meaning which, for no reason at all, as perhaps they are stepping out of the Tube or ringing a doorbell, descends on people, making them symbolical, making them representative, came upon them, and made them in the dusk standing, looking, the symbols of marriage, husband and wife. Then, after an instant, the symbolical outline which transcended the real figures sank down again … 

For Lily Briscoe art trades in these instants of illumination, these epiphanies, like “matches struck unexpectedly in the dark”. The painter’s aspirations run deep. 

Where does Grace Cossington Smith sit in relation to much of this? Does Virginia Woolf’s novel offer fresh insights into her oeuvre? As an essentially visual artist, Cossington Smith left no expository writings or long statements. Instead we have assorted paragraphs in her personal letters, a smattering of remarks the octogenarian painter made in the early 1970s in conversation with Daniel Thomas, who was preparing a survey exhibition, and the mute testimony of the many paintings themselves. It is easy to underestimate these deceptively pleasant pictures, for a twenty-first-century eye does not easily discern how they push against what was then the prevailing grain.

Cossington Smith took care in the design of her works, simplifying and balancing as she composed in keeping with the influential methods of the Bloomsbury group. This was surely to be anticipated. It was not just that Australian painters, with few exceptions, largely came to modernism via Bloomsbury. Cossington Smith had been in England when Roger Fry and Clive Bell organised there the highly publicised “Second Post Impressionist Exhibition” of 1912 (Woolf’s sister Vanessa was among the exhibitors), and even though the Australian artist did not visit the show, according to her biographer Bruce James, she had read the media uproar. And, by the late 1920s, the painter was fully conscious of the Bloomsbury critics, Fry being cited in the introduction to her 1931 exhibition. No wonder her drawings and watercolours of this period especially highlight a preference for organising forms geometrically, an approach widely used by English modernists to establish coherent structure. (Virginia Woolf herself planned the structure of To the Lighthouse by drawing an H-like symmetrical shape, calling the novel “two blocks joined by a corridor”.)

Viewpoint was important to the Australian modernist at this time. In a drawing from the top floor of the David Jones store, for example, Cossington Smith has the roadway enter and drive up the centre of her paper; and an arabesque eloquently washes from top left to lower right in a drawing of a ferry chugging by Sydney’s incomplete Harbour Bridge. Visual editing is primary. In her drawing of the vista from outside the Turret Theatre, Milson’s Point, large passages of the paper are left white and untouched; an effect used again either side of a view of Sydney Harbour from Crane Place, Bellevue Hill. Parts of these compositions are drawn in detail while others are left as empty blanks—what modernists of the 1920s called establishing positive space (the busy sections) and negative space (vacancies) within a composition. The aim was to devise an inventive design by playing the two properties against each other, establishing shapes as one worked. In these terms, the Turret Theatre piece is structured as a circle transected by the straight line of a telegraph pole, and the Crane Place drawing has a broad vertical bar in the centre of the white paper. From cityscapes to still-life studies, Cossington Smith will align observed details along tilted angles, graceful curves or sweeping arcs carefully positioned within her rectangle of paper.

But what is immediately apparent in Cossington Smith’s paintings of the late 1920s and 1930s is how they show such a strong affinity with Virginia Woolf’s stress on the primacy of rhythmic brushstrokes (the novelist described pictures as if they are knitted from paint strokes). The Australian modernist herself later explained that when handling her brush she had wanted “firm, separate notes of clear unworried paint … I just like putting it down and stopping.” This was partly in reaction against the mannered and showy paint skins of the reigning Streetonites, the artist describing their characteristic thick oily brushwork—which she loathed—as “slithery [and] slimy”.

Then again, there was a higher purpose to what Cossington Smith was about with her compact modernist brushstrokes: those vividly coloured dashes of paint are gathered in chromatic bands so as to convey visual meaning. This is most apparent in her view of new office blocks in Sydney’s Martin Place, Centre of a City (1925), and a cluster of works showing the Harbour Bridge under construction, including The Bridge in Curve and The Bridge in Building (both 1929-30). In these works the short coloured strokes are aligned rhythmically to suggest bands of radiant energy emitted by the modern city and its marvels of engineering. Cossington Smith purposefully uses the tempo of her brush to press a message.

When quizzed on technical influence, Cossington Smith always confessed an early admiration for Antoine Watteau, whose work she encountered on her first trip to Europe. This makes sense. The rococo master handled his brush with a sensual ease and economy relished by professional painters: a shrubbery, for example, will be suggested by a pattern of curling lime strokes laid over a smeared zone of dark jade pigment. Watteau reduced so much to surface, the irreducible physicality of his paintings appealing to Cossington Smith’s budding modernist eye. Despite this stated source, Vincent van Gogh—a favourite of the Bloomsbury set—is sometimes mentioned in discussion of her brushstrokes. But her 1920s paint is not textured, nor is it applied like his in an energised or potentially agitated manner. Instead, her brushwork is patterned and deliberate. She is in calm control. Which is why she always paints on board, be it cardboard, plywood, or canvas glued on pulpboard. The artist required the firmness of a hard surface, that resistance, to keep each mark crisp and distinct (the paint strokes would splay if she used a springy stretched canvas).

A reader might sift through To the Lighthouse for more points of contact with the Australian’s pictures of the period, although the novel is not an artistic instruction manual. The links remain loose and general. Still, there are tantalising connections with the final phase of Cossington Smith’s oeuvre, indeed, new layers of veiled meaning are revealed when we perceive her later canvases refracted through the prism of Woolf’s writing. 

A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf’s essay of 1929 on the predicament of women novelists, begins with a blunt declaration: “a woman must have money and a room of her own to write fiction”. Woolf points to the necessity for an individual to receive an adequate autonomous income, and to have access to a private room, in order to practise as a creator and intellectual. Fiction, and for that matter art, cannot be made without them. One has neither the time nor the solitude needed to study and think, to work and create: they are the givens fundamental to sustained imaginative activity. However, Woolf continued, the historical impediment for women was their relentless dependency on their families for these two things, that is, on the consideration of fathers or husbands, brothers or sons. And that was rarely forthcoming.

Grace Cossington Smith relied on a caring supportive family. Her middle-class parents, Ernest and Grace, were gentle urbane people who nurtured a taste for civilising pursuits in their five children. The youngsters were encouraged to read literature, were taken to concerts and the theatre; they learned drawing and music (there was a piano in the home). The artist’s mother, who had aspired to a musical career before her marriage, devotedly supported her teenage daughter as a vocation emerged. This parental backing was to extend fully into the painter’s adult life, beginning in 1912 when her solicitor father took the aspiring artist and her elder sister Mabel to Europe for two years. The young women were to acquire that cultural sophistication only the Continent could supply, Cossington Smith touring the cathedrals and museums of Italy, Germany, England, and attending a provincial art school there.

Some later frowned on this steady family assistance, such as the taste-making publisher Sydney Ure Smith: “He thought I wasn’t earning my living,” the artist later recalled, “that I was a sort of amateur.” She became a part-time art teacher in the mid-1920s, ensuring an income for herself. However, her parents always provided the workroom with the closed door that—from Woolf’s view—was essential to practise art professionally. In 1914, when Cossington Smith was twenty-two, her father paid for a hut-cum-studio to be built for her in the garden at their Turramurra home. Following the marriage of the artist’s younger brother in 1929, her parents allowed her to use his vacated bedroom as a supplementary workspace. After her father’s death in 1938, the forty-six-year-old painter inherited the family home and sufficient finances to have it renovated so that she could vacate the garden shed for a large comfortable indoor studio. Significantly, it is the rooms of that dwelling, which now belonged to her, that would be the subject for the last grand phase of her oeuvre.

Grace Cossington Smith’s pictures of the 1950s and 1960s have no equal in Australian art. Their subject is the interior of “Cossington”, the artist’s home at Turramurra since 1913. Most viewers register their sunny disposition, the way they almost glow with joy, but they are exceedingly complex. Three rooms are obsessively represented: the lounge, the artist’s studio, and her bedroom. In the understated way of this intimist painter, each stands for an aspect of her life: the social, the professional, and the personal. Here they are, the rooms of her own, with all that potentially symbolises. This is the span of the artist’s space, as Virginia Woolf might say, her autonomy, the setting for her domestic and creative life; and so the pictures are, in a sense, self-portraits at one remove. No wonder they affect some viewers as intimate. Her personal identity is involved here.

The recurring theme in these tranquil interiors is looking: that is to say, looking and seeing, then sometimes looking and not seeing. Cossington Smith has us look out—out of the bedroom window, out of the studio door, in each case with the garden outside blurred into a screen of sun-drenched foliage. She has the viewer look in—into pictures hanging on the walls, into wardrobes with clothing neatly stacked, often into mirrors which cunningly never reflect the artist as she works. Those same motifs are tirelessly repeated in these visual tales about looking: window, door (open or closed), picture, wardrobe (open or closed), mirror. This sets up recurring compositional situations with the eye encountering frames wherever it turns. There are views within frames, reflections within frames, belongings within frames, pictures within frames, sometimes frames within frames as the artist works with interlocking domestic rectangles.

What primarily excites the eye is the shimmering prismatic effect of those opulent brushed surfaces, the way her paintings look as if they are encrusted with tessellated blocks of vivid colour. Moving in close, it is apparent that Cossington Smith layered her pigment. (“Just to put colour onto the surface in a flat way,” she said in 1965, “I feel that gives it a dead look.”) Having drawn the composition on the white gesso ground, she usually painted an initial layer of yellows in varying intensity. Over this, before the oil paint dried, she methodically set in a second layer of local colour, and then in some sections she added a third colour layer again, creating emphases and heightening the optical shimmer around forms.

Throughout, all relies on the textured oblong brushstrokes which are so uniquely hers. Cossington Smith made them using two types of flat brush: the Flat, which has the stiff bristles gathered in a long rectangular head, and the Bright, where they are packed together densely in a squat square-shaped head. Looking at her late pictures up close, we can see the artist has put down almost directly on top of each other two, sometimes three neat downward strokes of wet oil paint, each in a different colour. Over a thick pastel lemon stroke made with a flat brush she will, using either the same gauge brush or the next size smaller, put in another blocky stroke in cadmium orange, and on that she will, shifting brush size again, add a stumpy chrome green stroke. The resulting prismatic qualities are produced by the high key lower layer of colour showing through the wet brushstrokes added later. Scrutinised in detail, the effect resembles stones and coloured grout in a mosaic. This is potentially a lingering echo of the 1920s, the Bloomsbury circle having likened modern pictures to mosaics (they reasoned that the artist fuses separate details together in a modern composition).

There are compelling correspondences between these late paintings of the Australian modernist and To the Lighthouse. The glowing, sunny interiors Cossington Smith repeatedly depicts were the setting for decades of family life. For her, each room reverberated with cherished memory, with the love of departed parents and the youthful spirits of now mature siblings: “Dad used to say ‘the Smile of Home’,” the artist said of them to Daniel Thomas. Likewise, Woolf’s novel is steeped in reminiscence, the writer using throughout details remembered from childhood of family holidays in Cornwall. And, of course, this is also mirrored in the final part of To the Lighthouse, which pivots on Lily Briscoe recollecting daily life in the Ramsay holiday home a decade before when she labours at the easel: “as she dipped into the blue paint, she dipped into the past there too”, the narrative reveals. If she laments those who have passed away, there is nothing maudlin about Lily Briscoe’s evolving picture. It is imbued with good times, with the friendliness and warmth of the Ramsay family in a languid Edwardian summer. In each case—for Cossington Smith, for Woolf, for the fictional Briscoe—there is an underpinning emotional drama to the work which involves an interplay between external and internal versions of what the creator sees before her.

There is also her technique. Cossington Smith sometimes referred to her efforts to instil “feeling” in paintings. Similarly, To the Lighthouse is very much about conveying feeling. Woolf’s modernist narrative meanders between third-person commentary and the voices of different characters, slipping back and forth from their stream-of-consciousness to descriptions of things as observed by that character, and asides on their subconscious motivations. But there is another sense in which Virginia Woolf uses the novel to explore the representation of feeling. Brushwork was the means to convey feeling for Cossington Smith. So, too, the prolonged concern of Lily Briscoe is to use her brush to set down feelings, the novel concluding when she paints the final emphatic line in a picture of Mrs Ramsay’s garden: “With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished.” Needless to say, these sentiments echo the views on brushwork and feeling of Woolf’s artistic mentor Roger Fry, who had argued in “An Essay in Aesthetics” that “line is the record of a gesture, and that gesture is modified by the artist’s feeling which is thus communicated to us directly”.

Which brings one to the emotive content of Cossington Smith’s late interiors, how they are so implicitly expressive. When we speak of expression in Australian art, we usually mean the hot-tempered expressionism of the Angry Penguins and radical modernists. But, as Cossington Smith entered her sixties, it appears the mature modern painter had found another path, a way to express without being feverishly expressionist. Through the studied modulation of brushed line and layered colour, through the careful representation of an interior the artist had daily inhabited for her adult life, those intimist paintings strove to suggest an act of looking-with-feeling. This is as near as one can probably get to stream-of-consciousness in visual terms, to evoking the experience of intently seeing. With those remarkably worked brushstrokes Cossington Smith sought to render the world as actively experienced by a self. 

Lily Briscoe, the fictional artist, is haunted by a recurring thought when she returns to the Isle of Skye after the Great War. Will her modern canvases be taken seriously? She frets that her carefully wrought compositions, so infused with memory, will be discarded as the meagre efforts of an “old maid”. What most troubles her is a fear that the feelings recorded in those sensitive lines of pigment will not survive, and that future viewers will look at her paintings with uncomprehending eyes, deriving at best a superficial delight in their decorative appeal. I sometimes wonder if Grace Cossington Smith was visited over the years by the same lingering doubts.

The author of several books on Australian art history, Christopher Heathcote’s most recent work is The Art of Roger Kemp.