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:
“Fate is unalterable only in the sense that given a cause, a certain result must follow, but no cause is inevitable in itself, and man can shape his world if he does not resign himself to ignorance.”
—Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973)
“What would you do in my position? Would you drop the war where it is? Or, would you prosecute it in future, with elderstalk squirts, charged with rose water?”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)