Stravinsky’s lunch. Drusilla Modjeska. 1999.

Stella Bowen and Grace Cossington Smith were born a year apart, in the antipodean autumn of 1893 and 1892 respectively. Beyond this fact their lives were very different. One was a good cook; the other was not. One left Australia on the eve of the First World War and lived the rest of her life in Europe; the other lived for decades in the same house on the outskirts of Sydney. For one Paris and famous names; for the other the quiet life of a provincial suburb. One went off to find a life of art; the art of the other grew out of the life she lived. The bohemian and the spinster. They are like mirror images of each other, two sides of a coin.