National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Grace Cossington Smith

This work, with its sweeping directional movement of the road through the centre of the picture plane, depicts Eastern Road near the artist’s home in Turramurra at a time when it was still a semi-rural suburb. The watercolour was preceded by a detailed sketchbook drawing with precise colour notations. Cossington Smith told Daniel Thomas that when she was doing her initial drawing she was ‘pleased that a figure came onto the road to animate its emptiness’.