Design and Art Australia Online

Artist and teacher born 26 February 1908 in Launceston, Tasmania.

The son of shipping and general merchant Robert Norman Smith, Jack Carington Smith had four brothers [one died in childhood] and two sisters. He attended Launceston Church Grammar School, as his father had before him.

In 1925, aged seventeen, he relocated to Sydney were he worked as a clerk for the Shell Oil Company for three years. In the evenings he attended art classes at the East Sydney Technical College. In 1928 Carington Smith suffered a gangrenous appendix and returned to Launceston after the operation. While recuperating, he made the decision to become an artist and devote his life to art. He returned to Sydney, resumed his night classes and began working as a commercial artist. Over a period of eleven years, Carington Smith studied four nights a week under the guidance of Fred Britton, Douglas Dundas and, later, Fred Leist.

In 1936, he was the first night student to win the New South Wales Government Travelling Art Scholarship. The terms of the scholarship secured him a place in the Royal Academy School, London, where he studied under Fred Ernest Jackson. While in London he also attended Bernard Meninsky’s classes at the Westminster School. Carington Smith’s wife, Ruth [née Walker], whom he married in 1934, accompanied him with their baby daughter, Jill. They travelled to France and Italy before returning to Sydney in 1939.

Upon their return, Carington Smith held his first solo exhibition at the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney. The exhibition was opened by his former teacher Dundas and showcased work completed abroad. He received some success and continued to exhibit regularly with Macquarie Galleries until 1971.

With a young family and seeking financial security, Carington Smith accepted the position of Head of the Art Department at the Launceston Technical College. The following year, 1940, he took a similar position, Head of the Art Department, at Hobart Technical College. The Art Department separated from the Hobart Technical College in 1963 and became the School of Art, with Carington Smith continuing as Head of the Fine Art Department. Teaching was stimulating for Carington Smith: his experiences abroad had enlightened him, resulting in his desire to instil in his students the importance for artists to travel.

Carington Smith was a prolific painter who straddled genres and mediums. In 1949, he won the Sir John Sulman Prize for Mural Painting with his landscape Bush Pastoral. Dundas observed of Carington Smith’s technique: “His unerring appreciation of tonal values, fostered by his early training, was a key factor in all his work, particularly in oils, and nowhere is it more apparent than in these paintings of the night.” (Dundas 1973, p262) Strange Night won the 1953-54 Tasmanian Sesquicentenary Art Prize.

Over time, Carington Smith’s work became more abstract. His large abstract Garden Fantasy won the 1965 Tasmanian Art Prize. Sue Backhouse, author of his 1976 retrospective, recounts his comparison of music and art and his progression towards abstraction: “It seems reasonable to me that the painter should put colour and tone on the canvas in places that, in the moment of inspiration or clear thought, he feels they should go. it needs the public to rid its mid of the pre-conceived idea of what a painting should be and to think more, as it does a piece of music, appreciating the emotional, dramatic or poetic value of its arrangement in tone and colour.” (Backhouse 1976, p19).

Carington Smith established a reputation in portraiture through commissions and art prizes. Over the years he painted numerous portraits, including over sixty commissions of academics, explorers (Sir Edmund Hilary, 1960), architects (Leighton Erwin, Architect for the Royal Hobart Hospital, 1954), administrators and businessmen. In 1959, the Commonwealth Government commissioned him to paint murals for Australia House in London. Joseph Burke, Professor of Fine Arts, University of Melbourne, observed in 1963: “He is also one of the few contemporary painters who can execute a portrait which is simultaneously an authentic likeness, a psychological study and a work of art.” (Burke 1963).

He preferred to familiarise himself with his sitter before painting them. His portrait of Leslie Greener, which was awarded the 1966 Helena Rubenstein Portrait Prize, is reported to have taken fifteen two-hour sessions. In 1955, Carington Smith was awarded two portrait prizes, the Adelaide Melrose Prize for his portrait of Professor A.L. McAulay, and the first Women’s Weekly Prize for Portraiture (1500 pounds, at the time the largest sum offered in the world for an art prize) for Arrangement in Green. In 1963, he was awarded the prestigious Archibald Prize for his portrait of Professor James McAuley.

Carington Smith was honoured with a solo exhibition of his paintings in the 1962 Adelaide Festival of the Arts. The following year, a retrospective of his work was organised by the Adult Education Board of Tasmania. He was represented in the 1956 Arts Festival of the Olympic Games exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. His work was included in several travelling exhibitions, including 'Contemporary Australian Painters’, which toured Canada in 1957-58; the 'Matson Line Exhibition of Australian Painters’, held in San Francisco 1959; the 'Contemporary Australian Art’ exhibition at Auckland City Art Gallery, New Zealand, in 1960; and the 1962 Transfield Art Prize, which was displayed at Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 1964, he became a fellow of the International Institute of Arts and Letters in Switzerland.

Despite the international and interstate exposure, Carington Smith spent the majority of his life in Tasmania, a place he cherished deeply. Towards the end of his life he travelled to Europe twice, first in 1964 and again in 1969. On his first visit, Carington Smith and his family travelled via caravan through France, Italy, Spain, Yugoslavia, Holland, Greece and Great Britain.

Shy and introspective by nature, he was highly respected among his peers. Lloyd Rees (in Gertsakis 1985) wrote of Carington Smith: “Among my most precious Tasmanian memories are visits to the Carington Smith home. We would think and talk far into the night. The tranquil beauty of this has come through in pictures by Jack that are almost abstract in quality, the room itself seeming to merge with the river beyond. To my mind these works associated with his home are unique in Australian painting, and how truthfully they express the man, reserved and gentle, but behind them a disciplined and determined authority.”

Due to deteriorating health, Carington Smith retired from teaching in 1970. He continued painting and was awarded the Sir Warwick Fairfax Prize in 1971 for his abstract The Human Image. He died in Hobart on 19 March 1972. His ashes were scattered into the sea off Cloudy Bay, Bruny Island. He was survived by his wife, two daughters and son.

Writers:

E J CollertonNote:

Date written:

2009

Last updated:

2011

Status:

peer-reviewed