It has been a while since we have done an artist spotlight here on It's a Classical Life , and as I was admiring the work of Grace Cossington Smith on several different occasions lately, I thought she would fit in perfectly here. Her biography and the quotes here come from the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ANU) and the photos are courtesy of the National Gallery of Australia . Grace Smith was born in Sydney in 1892 into a large Anglican family, with ties to royalty (her uncle was private chaplain to Queen Victoria at Osborne, Isle of Wight) and a love for art. She studied art in Sydney as a young woman, and when she was twenty she travelled to England for two years with her sister. Here she continued to sketch and study art, and even travelled to Germany where she was inspired by the paintings of Watteau. You can see how his use of colour has inspired Cossington's own paintings. Smith returned to Sydney in 1915 and once more resumed her art classes....