John Russell’s obsession with the French island Belle-Ile

Tue 11 Jun 2024

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, creative exchange between France and Japan had a profound effect on art and design — and sparked the development of entirely new aesthetic movements. In 1854, Japan reopened to the world after more than 200 years of near isolation and the global market for Japanese creative production expanded rapidly: screens, ceramics, textiles and prints all became hugely popular.

European artists were captivated by the Japanese woodblock prints known as ukiyo-e, meaning ‘pictures of the floating world’. Characterised by flat areas of colour, defined outlines, cropped, asymmetrical compositions and a lack of horizon lines, these prints often featured everyday scenes. French artists, in particular, were greatly excited by these alternative ways of representing the world. Early forms of photography further encouraged artists to capture fleeting moments of daily life often absent in more formal academic traditions. This style of painting came to be known as Impressionism.

John Russell ‘Les Aiguilles, Belle-Ile’ c.1890

John Russell ‘Rochers de Belle-Ile’ c.1900

John Russell ‘La Pointe de Morestil par mer calme’ 1901

John Russell ‘Roc Toul (Roche Guibel)’ 1904-05

For the Impressionists, Japan represented a departure from ‘the West’ and all that was familiar — a dreamlike, remote place that few of them would ever visit. Instead, artists such as Camille Pissarro, John Russell (16 June 1858-1930) and, later, Pablo Picasso, sought the beauty of the natural, pre-industrial world in the countryside.

John Russell c.1883

Australian expatriate artist John Russell first visited Belle Île in 1886 — a small French island fourteen kilometres off the Quiberon peninsula in Brittany known as ‘La Côte Sauvage’. Literally ‘the wild coast’, here the land ends abruptly and drops into a turbulent sea, which, over millennia, has formed fantastically shaped rocks and grottoes. It’s dramatic coastline, wild seas, and fierce storms exhilarated the Australian painter, with his seascapes portraying alternately stormy and calm aspects of the island.

Belle-Île c.1900

John Russell’s house c.1909

View from John Russell’s house c.1900

Russell settled in Belle Île two years later in 1888 and built a large cliff-top house — which included a studio that opened directly out to the ocean high above the inlet at Port Goulphar (illustrated) — where he lived for two decades with his family until his wife Marianna Mattlocco’s premature death in 1908.

Auguste Rodin’s wax portrait Madame Russell 1888 (illustrated) depicts one of his models — formerly Marianna Mattiocco — it was commissioned by Russell in 1888, possibly to commemorate his marriage. This is the second of four wax portraits Rodin is known to have made of Madame Russell, whom he considered to be the ‘most beautiful woman in Paris’.

Auguste Rodin ‘Madame Russell’ 1888

Marianna Mattlocco 1885

John Russell painting Marianna

Russell’s paintings Les Aiguilles, Belle-Ile (The Needles, Belle-Ile) c.1890 (illustrated), Rochers de Belle-Ile (Rocks at Belle-Ile) c.1900 (illustrated), La Pointe de Morestil par mer calme (Calm sea at Morestil Point) 1901 (illustrated), and Roc Toul (Roche Guibel) (Toul Rock (Guibel Rock)) 1904-05 (illustrated) show the artist’s obsession with dramatic subjects and colour that was typical of the time, as was the practice of painting subjects repeatedly under different lighting and weather conditions.

Although a contemporary and friend of many Australian Impressionists, Russell’s use of intense and brilliant colour and exuberant brushwork, often with a thick build-up of paint on rough, textured canvas, distinguished his work from that of other Australian painters, as his paintings retain the evidence of their making.

These works were most likely painted in front of its subject, being able to convey the emotion of the scene. However, to achieve the layering of colour in many of his works, Russell would have had to allow each layer to dry before the next, to prevent the colours mixing. This would have necessitated returning to the same site repeatedly in order to complete the painting.

Curatorial extracts, research and supplementary material compiled by Elliott Murray, Senior Digital Marketing Officer, QAGOMA

John Russell’s Les Aiguilles, Belle-Ile and Roc Toul (Roche Guibel) are on display within the Queensland Art Gallery’s International Art Collection, Philip Bacon Galleries (7-9).