Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

precedence over character and position. 'Painting to me', Grace Cossington Smith said many years later, 'is expressing ... form in colour, colour vibrant with light'.2 In terms of composition and colour, Portrait ofa man is less adventurous than The Sock Knitter, but nevertheless it presents us with the shape, the density, the planes, the weight of a man —the pictorial substance of hair, of clothes, of hands holding a book. Grace Cossington Smith always tempered her Modernism with humanism. She never went as far as abstraction. As well as expressing form and colour in painting, she wanted to capture the 'inarticulate grace and beauty' of all form, the 'silent quality which is unconscious and belongs to all things created'.3It was not only the density of a man she wanted to capture, but something of his inner nature; by this she did not mean his social details so much as a shared quality of being. Behind the man is a ledge, perhaps a window, perhaps a hatch, with a sugar bowl, and some bread. Through this uncertain aperture streams light, a yellowy-cream light, and it is this that illuminates the man, and the portrait. Is it light from the world outside? Or is it light from another part of the house, where meals are prepared and women talk as they cook and work? It is in the relationship of this man to the world beyond his chair that we find a clue to the portrait's meaning. From her earliest drawings, Grace Cossington Smith had a fascination with the world beyond. Her student sketch­ books, which date from 1911, contain many drawings of hallways and doors, windows and verandahs, one space opening onto another, light entering from unseen sources. In the early oils there is often, as there is in this painting, a kind of unease about these hidden sources of light; it unsettles Portrait ofa man in interesting ways. There is a certain anxiety in the composition that contradicts the confidence of the pipe, the attention of the man on the deeply coloured book. We share his focus, in that our eye is drawn to the line between eye, pipe and book, and yet even as it is drawn into that moment of concentration, it is pulled away by the ledge, and the light, in the top left-hand comer behind him. Other possibilities vie for our attention. We know from the verso signature that Portrait of a man was painted before 1920. In other words it was painted in the immediate aftermath of the First World War which had ended in 1918. Grace Cossington Smith was then still studying with Dattilo Rubbo, the only teacher in Sydney during and straight after the war with any knowledge of Post- Impressionism or the art that was coming from Europe. At lunch he read to his students from the letters of van Gogh, and these deeply impressed Cossington Smith. Colour took on the force of revelation. Inspired by reproductions from the Camden Town Group in London, Rubbo encouraged his students to 'take out the dashed browns'.4 Cossington Smith's first response was The Sock Knitter. The brilliant colours, lollipop bright, that are characteristic of her later work, first appear with the challenge of certainty in the landscapes of the mid-1920s. Portrait of a man predates that time; painted after her first flush of colour confidence, she had sunk back into tonalism. 'Art is in rather a muddy condition with me', she wrote to a friend in 1916. 'In fact [I am] floundering in the mud of paint and failures.'5In Portrait of a man, we can see yellow trying to get out, streaked in a self-consciously modemist manner but muted and dulled 122 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965