JOHN PETER RUSSELL Australian, 1858-1930

John Russell's tempestuous, colour-saturated Belle-Ile seascapes rank as his greatest paintings and undoubtedly the point at which he came closest to the French impressionism of Claude Monet. The Sydney-born Russell first met Monet in September 1886 when both artists were staying on the remote island of Belle-Ile-en-Mer, off the Brittany coast in north-west France. Monet – ‘the prince of the impressionists', as Russell called him – assumed that the young Australian was American; but he found Russell ‘très aimable' and dined with him in preference to taking ‘abominable' meals at his inn. The two worked side by side for a time on the rocky Atlantic shore (very much out of character for the Frenchman) and it seems likely that seeing Monet's Belle-Ile series exhibited in Paris the following year was a factor in Russell's decision to settle on the island with his family in 1888. With his Italian wife, Marianna, Russell built a large house high above the inlet at Port Goulphar, overlooking the Atlantic ocean. He would remain there for twenty years – the happiest both personally and professionally of his life.

Russell did not at first approve of Monet's technique with its deliberate lack of distinction between form and colour, but by the late 1890s his own style had come closer to Monet's. The present work, whose title translates as Stormy weather at Belle-Ile, epitomises all Russell's passion for the place and is heir to paintings by Monet such as Storm off the Belle-Ile coast, 1886, now in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Gros temps à Belle-Ile depicts the roiling sea at the entrance to Port Goulphar. Like Monet, Russell returned to certain subjects repeatedly and, as Ursula Prunster has observed, his series of paintings of this particular view are among his ‘most dramatic, chromatically and compositionally resolved and awe-inspiring canvases’.  Others in the series, ‘all painted from the same place, but under conditions of varying intensity’, include Rocks at Belle-Ile (Queensland Art Gallery), Rough sea, Morestil (Art Gallery of New South Wales), Rough Sea (formerly Joseph Brown Collection) and Belle-Ile (private collection). ¹ Here in Gros temps à Belle-Ile, the foreground cliffs are warm-coloured against the icy water, linking tonally with the bright pinks and brilliant blues in the sky above the dark drama of the rocks on the horizon.

Russell once wrote to his friend Tom Roberts about mixing his own pigments and experimenting with colour. ‘Simple colour but strong’, he advised, and ‘keep pure as long as possible'; and later, ‘By the way, I think impressionism wins because of the number of recruits. As understood here [in France] it consists not of hasty sketches but in finished work in which the purity of colour and intention is kept'. ² 

Russell was the only Australian artist to have first-hand contact with any of the original French impressionists. Unfortunately his contemporary reputation suffered somewhat because of his reluctance to sell paintings (he had independent means and, it seems, no need to do so). However Vincent van Gogh called him one of ‘the modern renaissance school'; and Auguste Rodin was undoubtedly prophetic when he wrote, ‘Your works will live, I am certain. One day you will be placed on the same level as our friends Monet, Renoir and van Gogh'. ³ This major painting, from the artist’s most important period and in superb original condition, has only recently been discovered in a private collection in France.

1. In Belle-Ile: Monet, Russell and Matisse in Brittany, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2001, pp. 34-5 and see plates 23-28.
2. Quoted in Galbally, A., The Art of John Peter Russell, Sun Books, Melbourne, 1977, pp. 91, 95.
3. The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh, Thames & Hudson, London, 1958, II, p.536; and Rodin quoted in Joseph Brown Gallery exhibition catalogue, Melbourne, 1968.

Please note this lot is subject to G.S.T.