Jeffrey Smart

This painting brings together visual motifs that are mundane in the real world but take on an uncanny and dramatic presence on the canvas. A woman dressed in black presides over an array of chairs in a seemingly random scatter. Occasionally spot-lit like an actor in a play, each chair has its own distinct character. Similarly, the female figure is like a character in a film and recurs in many of Smart’s paintings of this period, such as Spring landscape and Piraeus II. These paintings seem to draw on the atmosphere of the Italian cinema Smart admired such as Vittorio De Sica’s neo-realist film Bicycle thieves (1948).