John RUSSELL
Australian 1858–1930
worked throughout Europe (1886)–1921
John Russell met his lover and future wife, Marianna Mattiocco, in Paris in 1885. She was the daughter of peasant farmers Guiseppa and Pasquale Mattiocco of Monte Cassino, a village between Rome and Naples, and had come to Paris with two of her brothers. They formed a group of strolling players, working the cafes and performing on the streets. They also earned money by modelling for artists, and Russell’s first work with a Mattiocco connection is a drawing of Rafaël Mattiocco, dated 1885, for a proposed pastoral work, The lyre player. The portrait of Guiseppa Mattiocco (Doña Peppa) is inscribed Paris, 1886, but must have been drawn during that latter part of that year when Russell took Marianna and their first child to visit her parents at Monte Cassino.
For a time in the early 1880s Russell had studied under Alphonse Legros, Slade Professor at University College, London. Legros insisted upon careful drawing and conscientious work, including ‘the necessity of studying your models with a thoroughness as to get them by heart.’1 Ironically, Russell’s rapid progress with the medium, so evident in this drawing, made his ‘eventual decision to adopt Impressionist colour painting such a protracted experience’.2
1 H. Wright, The Etchings, Drypoints and Lithographs of Alphonse Legros, 1837–1911, London, 1934, p. 12.
2 A. Galbally, The Art of John Peter Russell, Melbourne, 1977, p. 12
Terence Lane
This beautiful picture belongs to a group of studies of blossom and open flowers, all painted in c. 1887, which includes another, more delicate, version of this subject, Almond tree in blossom, painted with a blue ground (private collection, France); and also in the Joseph Brown Collection, Peonies and head of a woman, c. 1888. The close-up composition, conceived almost as a snapshot or detail, is in itself radical. All pictorial space has been suppressed, with the branches and blossoms painted on a flat ground. In this sense the picture belongs firmly to the Parisian avant-garde.
The influence of Japanese prints is critical to understanding the sources of the drawing and pictorial design, and we can also detect in this work the strong and continuing influence of Vincent van Gogh, whose enthusiasm for the art of Japan was then at its strongest. Ann Galbally has noted that van Gogh became closely associated with Siegfried Bing (1838–1905),1 who was by then established as the most important dealer in Japanese art in Paris, and in February 1887 van Gogh himself organised a small exhibition of Japanese prints from Bing’s stock and seems to have had some sort of agency for their sale. In 1887 van Gogh produced a number of pictures deliberately echoing his experience of Japanese prints, of which the most interesting for our purposes was his Japonaiserie: The flowering plum tree (after Hiroshige) (in the collection of Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam),2 a composition dominated by the linear, oblique silhouette of a tree with delicate blossoms arranged decoratively on the surface.
1 A. Galbally, The Art of John Peter Russell, Melbourne, 1977, pp. 37–8.
2 See especially B. Welsh-Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh and the Birth of Cloisonism, Toronto, 1981, pp.108–15.
Dr Gerard Vaughan
This relatively small, freely painted work reflects Russell’s experience of Japanese art, placing the woman’s head, almost certainly his wife, Marianna, below and behind the dominant branch of flowering peonies. The artist’s intention is the creation of a richly coloured surface pattern, with space suppressed, and the figure almost incidental. The picture clearly relates to a group of works painted in 1887, with the head of the sitter set against a background pattern of flowers.
This relatively small, freely painted work also reflects Russell’s experience of Japanese art, placing the woman’s head (almost certainly his wife, Marianna) below and behind the dominant horizontal branch of flowering peonies. The artist’s intention is the creation of a richly coloured surface pattern, with space suppressed, and the figure almost incidental.
The picture clearly relates to a group of works painted in 18871 with the head of the sitter set against a background pattern of flowers. As the latter picture is inscribed by Russell ‘Longpré-les-Corps-Saints, mai 1887’, it can be presumed that the work in the Brown collection was also painted in that same garden, where the Russells lived in the summer of 1886 and 1887 before moving to their new home on Belle-Île.
Ann Galbally has noted the convention of painting a head surrounded by flowers in much English Pre-Raphaelite art in its later phase and we know that Russell was familiar with the work of the key Pre-Raphaelites. It is worth noting that this picture is one of Joseph Brown’s personal favourites.
A drawing of Marianna’s head in profile, looking downwards, inscribed with the date 1888, appears to be related.2
1 M. Fabian, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard; and Portrait head of Marianna (Private collection).
2 A. Galbally, The Art of John Peter Russell, Melbourne, 1977, p. 13.
Dr Gerard Vaughan
Rough sea, Belle-Île, 1900, belongs to a group of works in which Russell evokes a stormy sea in the Atlantic, almost certainly at Belle-Île off the coast of Brittany, where he made his permanent home from 1888.
Russell met Claude Monet at Belle-Île in September 1886, and would undoubtedly have known well the series of Belle-Île coastal scenes and seascapes which Monet commenced at this time, and which were exhibited at the Galerie Georges Petit in May 1887; these included his Storm off the Belle-Île coast, now in the Musée d’Orsay. The painting of stormy coastal scenes and seascapes constituted, therefore, a genre within the imagery of Impressionist landscape, such as the National Gallery of Victoria’s fine Monet of 1883, Rough weather at Etrétat.
In this work Russell almost evokes a sense of explosion, with the boiling sea and stormy sky fusing in the kind of swirling vortex composition we associate with J. M. W. Turner’s late works, for example, Steam-boat off a harbour’s mouth, 1842, National Gallery, London, which Russell would have known from his student years in London. Russell’s technique here, however, is entirely Impressionist, with strong, pure colours—blues, mauves, pinks and greens—rapidly applied, giving an abstracting all-over texture and luminosity to the picture surface.
Dr Gerard Vaughan
After the death of his wife Marianna in 1908, John Russell left Belle-Île and took a house in Paris. With his daughter Jeanne, who was pursuing her singing career, he travelled in southern France and Italy and, around the time of his second marriage in June 1912, he settled in Portofino, a resort town on the Ligurian Sea east of Genoa. He had by then largely abandoned oil painting for watercolour—the more portable and convenient medium better suited his mood and peripatetic lifestyle.
Russell’s watercolour technique is brilliantly demonstrated here: his practice was to lightly pencil in the composition, to dampen the paper and then lay in the broad washes and slashes of colour. His forms are prismatic, his composition dynamic and his colour highly keyed and not necessarily naturalistic.
Portofino, c. 1915, is one of Russell’s finest watercolours. Its spontaneity and freshness convey his delight in the medium.
Terence Lane