Impressions
Richard Shone
The Lost Impressionist: A Biography of John Peter Russell Elizabeth Salter (Angus and Robertson 0.80)
Neglected, perhaps, but not lost. Russell will be remembered for his portrait of Van Gogh and that painter's friendly letters to him. But Miss Salter's title matches her approach to this strange, not altogether likeable Australian who produced a handful of paintings at Belle-11e off the Brittany coast. She is fond of exaggeration and, I suspect, those little flutters of fancy beloved of biographers when their sources are slim. In using an impressionist style herself, she can be evocative but also tiresomely inexact as regards time and place. It is a -kind of literary aertex — while keeping you warm, a good deal escapes through the holes.
Russell's story is not well known, and his contacts and friendships with most of the great names of French painting in the 1880's and '90's deserve all the attention Miss Salter has given them. Monet was a friend and influence; Rodin became an intimate of the Russell family; there were encounters with Sisley and Pissarro; Van Gogh involved Russell in that community of painters he longed to establish at Arles. The visits in 1896 and '97 of Matisse to Belle-Ile have not been sufficieatly explored by most scholars — Alfred Barr's classic study makes a brief, inaccurate mention. That Russell's conversation and example were important, we can see from the changes in Matisse's work at that time and Russell, aware of such response, gave two Van Gogh drawings to the younger painter. But Russell's own standing as an artist, which has increased in recent years, suffers from the rather sketchy account Miss Salter allows at the expense of her chapters bursting with his illustrious contemporaries.
Russell was a complex character; the contradictions in his temperament go a long way to explain why he did not leave a more satisfactory body of work and why he virtually abandoned painting in his last years. The man of action — he was boxer, sailor and traveller — warred continually with the sensuous, contemplative side of his nature. He was nomadic yet saddled with a large family and delighted in playing the patriarch; he was constitutionally Bohemian yet embarrassingly rich. He luxuriated among his children, his island retinue, the tall, handsome 'seigneur' of Belle-Ile; but gnawing at this cosiness were the example of Van Gogh, the poverty of Sisley, Monet's triumphant single-mindedness. In deference to friends who needed money from sales, he never exhibited his own work. A neurotic man, lacking self-confidence, is discernable beneath the healthy, hail-fellow exterior. One is inclined to be suspicious of someone who builds his own yacht. Russell built two.
The sea or, as Miss Salter insists on calling it, "the briny," was an early and continuing passion and the inspiration of most of Russell's best pictures. He knew it first in Australia where the Russells were well-to-do philistine pioneers who made a fortune from iron bridges. Miss Salter is careful in developing the butch Australian boy image, with paintbrush in hand replacing gun and boom. He voyaged to the South Pacific and to Japan where, independent of European taste, he discovered the appeal of Japanese woodcuts. Announcing his wish to study art, his parents packed him off swiftly as a:gentleman apprentice' in engineering to Lincoln, an obviously unnerving experience. After a further truculent spell in Australia he sailed again to England, having enrolled at the Slade. Russell's later move to the Atelier Cormon in Paris put him in touch with I...utrec, Bernard and Van Gogh. He soon fell in love with and in 1888 married a Sicilian girl, one of Rodin's models for 'The Gates of Hell'. Of exceptional beauty and submissive character, she bore twelve children, six of whom died in infancy; she herself died of cancer in 1908. He gave up the great house he had built on Belle-Ile and after a stay in New Zealand and a second marriage, he settled in Sydney pottering about the harbour until his death in 1930, an unknown figure referred to, if at all, in lives of Van Gogh, as his American or English friend.
Miss Salter has disentangled inevitable legends and corrected inaccuracies. Some, however, of her own making have crept into this poorly presented book with its inadequately captioned illustrations and summary index. How could Russell on his marriage have bought his apartment from Berlioz who had died when the painter was probably throwing boomerangs and in shorts? And surely Belle-Ile is hyphenated? But the vividness of much of her writing will I hope make more people look at Russell's paintings, those sunlit visions of cliffs plunging into brilliant seas whose originality Monet and Matisse were among the first to acknowledge.
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