First World War
Arriving in Australia back from a holiday to England shortly before the First World War began, Smith supported the war effort. Her 1915 painting The Sock Knitter, of her sister knitting socks for the war effort, is often regarded as the first post-impressionist painting in Australia. The painting shows a girl studiously working away, knitting from a ball of yarn which sits delicately by her side. When taken in the context of the war, it is a powerful picture of someone working on something small to help a greater cause. She also later drew a series of cartoons which were satirical and anti-German, showing caricatures of German army figures. She also did a drawing of Belgian refugees fleeing the Germans at the start of the war. Her drawings of these wartime figures are much different from the usual style in her work.
Read more about this topic: Grace Cossington Smith
Famous quotes containing the words world and/or war:
“The world there was the flat world of the ancients; to the east, a cornfield that stretched to daybreak; to the west, a corral that reached to the sunset; between, the conquests of peace, dearer-bought than those of war.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“The War was decided in the first twenty days of fighting, and all that happened afterwards consisted in battles which, however formidable and devastating, were but desperate and vain appeals against the decision of Fate.”
—Winston Churchill (1874–1965)