John LONGSTAFF

Australian 1861–1941
worked throughout Europe 1890–95, 1901–20

October 1888 John Russell and his wife Marianna had left Paris and moved into their new house on Belle-Île, off the coast of Brittany. Le Château de l’Anglais, as the locals called it, provided Russell with a base from which to make painting expeditions round the island. It also meant that he could entertain friends from Paris. Fellow Australians John and ‘Topsy’ Longstaff were among his first guests. The Longstaffs were escaping their miserable one-roomed lodgings in Montmartre, and John was hoping to recover from a serious bout of black influenza that had laid him low. They stayed for several months and, although the wives fell out, John enjoyed a healthy outdoors lifestyle and extended time with his host. The sun-drenched Cabbage plot, Belle-Île, 1890, (in the collection of the Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum) is a brilliant memento of this time. It is painted in a partial impressionist style with short strokes of pure colour, and shows the influence of Russell who already knew Vincent van Gogh and had met Claude Monet. Farm, Belle-Île, c. 1889, is just as brilliant in its own way, a more subdued tonal exercise, broadly and rapidly painted with square brushes. The subject is the long range of low, whitewashed farm buildings that appears in Cabbage plot, Belle-Île and hovers on the horizon in Russell’s Field of beetroots, c. 1900, (National Gallery of Victoria).

The time soon came for Longstaff to give up these diversions and to return to his National Gallery Scholarship commitments in Paris (including the huge painting The sirens, c. 1891, (in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria)), and to a life of portraiture.

Terence Lane