Landscape at Pentecost

Seen from an elevated viewpoint upon a crest, this neo-impressionist scene depicts a cultivated landscape in Sydney’s north. A heavily furrowed road surges up like a solid wave across the foreground, taking a dramatic plunge before its ribbon-like ruts slowly ebb into the quiet distance of the mauve and green hills. A favoured motif among early twentieth-century artists, the open road symbolised the progress of the modern age or a personal voyage of transition.

Grace Cossington Smith’s vision exudes a characteristic unearthly, vitalist force. Here, the road connotes something deeply felt; in it a line of energy reaches forward as though beyond the picture plane, gently summoning the viewer. The artist herself observed, ‘art is the expression of things unseen – the golden thread running through time’.

Her pantheistic understanding of a transcendental, benign spirit in nature aligned with the secular sense of spirituality underpinning modern art. Grace Cossington Smith became renowned for exploring the ineffable through a delicate use of colour and an ability to capture light to rapturous shimmering effect.

Regarded as one of Australia’s greatest modernist painters, she is best known for pioneering a form of post-impressionism that stands alone for unifying inner cadences and local inflections.

Tracey Lock, Curator of Australian Paintings and Sculpture