John Russell (Australian painter)

John Peter Russell was born in the Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst, the eldest of four children of John Russell, a Scottish engineer, and his wife Charlotte Elizabeth, née Nicholl, from London.[3] John Russell senior's engineering firm was responsible for a good deal of the ironwork produced in Sydney in the 19th century.[4] J. P. Russell was a nephew of Sir Peter Nicol Russell. Russell was educated at the Goulburn School in Garrooriagang.[5] Russell moved to England at the age of eighteen, initially to take up an engineering apprenticeship.[1][5] He later used the considerable inheritance he received from his father to enrol at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, on 5 January 1881 and studied under Alphonse Legros for three years.[3][6] Russell then went to Paris to study painting under Fernand Cormon. His fellow students there included Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Émile Bernard. Russell was a man of means and, having married a beautiful Italian seamstress and model of Auguste Rodin's, Marianna Antonietta Mattiocco,[2][7] he settled at Belle Île off the coast of Brittany, where he designed his own home and established an artists' colony.[6] Russell was the first non-native to move to the island, leading locals to call his home overlooking Port Goulphar "Le Chateau de l'Anglais".[1][7] He would have 11 children with Mattiocco, of whom six, five sons and a daughter, survived.[2][8]

Russell met Vincent van Gogh in Paris and formed a close friendship with him.[9] The two artists particularly bonded over being foreigners in the Parisian avant-garde scene.[10] They maintained correspondence, and some of Van Gogh's private letters reveal his deep fondness for Russell and his art.[11] After his first summer in Arles in 1888 he sent twelve drawings of his paintings to Russell, to inform him about the progress of his work. Claude Monet often worked with Russell at Belle Île and influenced his style, though it has been said that Monet preferred some of Russell's Belle Île seascapes to his own. In 1890, Russell left Belle Île and traveled to Antibes in a horse-drawn cart, where he rented a house for the winter and produced some of his most acclaimed work.[6] Due to his substantial private income Russell did not attempt to make his pictures well known. In the 1880s and 1890s, Russell hewed closely to pure French impressionist style.[10]

Russell's daughter, Madame Jeanne Jouve, known in Paris as a singer, has stated that he had built up a collection of impressionist works – van Gogh, Gauguin, Bernard, Guillaumin – which he intended to give to Australia, but none is known to have survived beyond his death.[12]

In 1907, Marianna Russell died in Paris of cancer.[4] Grief-stricken, Russell buried her next to his home on Belle Île and destroyed 400 of his oils and watercolours.[10] Auguste Rodin despaired at the destruction of "those marvels", and in one of his final letters to Russell, said "Your works will live, I am certain. One day you will be placed on the same level with our friends Monet, Renoir, and Van Gogh."[12] He married his second wife in 1912, the American singer Caroline de Witt Merrill who was a friend of Russell's daughter and went by the stage name of Felize Medori.[10][6][1] Russell and his new wife moved between Italy, Switzerland, and England, where Russell's five sons served in the Allied forces during the First World War.[1][2] In 1922, Russell briefly lived in New Zealand where he helped one of his sons start a citrus farm.[1]

In 1921, Russell returned to the Sydney area, where he lived in a fisherman's cottage in suburb of Watsons Bay and had a small wooden studio on Sydney Harbour.[1][7] He suffered a fatal heart attack in 1930 while lifting rocks to build a wall outside his cottage.[2][7]

Thea Proctor, a cousin of Russell's prominent in Sydney art and society circles, did much to promote his work in her later years.[13]

Russell was a friend of Auguste Rodin and Emmanuel Frémiet, and his wife's beauty is immortalised in Rodin's Minerve sans Casque and Fremiet's Joan of Arc. His portrait of van Gogh, painted about 1886–87, was allegedly Van Gogh's favourite depiction of himself: the Dutch artist even told wrote his brother Theo, ten months before his death, exhorting him to "take good care of my portrait by Russell, which means a lot to me".[5] The painting of Van Gogh was acquired by the Van Gogh Museum, at Amsterdam in 1938.[14][5] A sheet of portrait drawings of van Gogh is at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.[15] Two water-colours and a small oil painting are in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and there is a drawing in the Adelaide collection.

He was also a lifelong friend of Tom Roberts, one of the main figures of the Australian Heidelberg School of impressionism. Russell was not directly involved in this movement, giving him the title "Australia's Lost Impressionist".[16]