Grace Cossington Smith (1892-1984)

'A meditation on her mother's declining health and mortality ... implied a meditation on what it meant to be alive on this earth. This is felt in Cossington Smith's images of flowers growing, the subject of a number of small works painted in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In the late 1920s Cossington Smith had often thought of flower studies as portraits and it was as though she now aspired to their quiet vitality.' (D. Hart (ed.), op. cit., p.44)