Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

John Russell: Australia’s French Impressionist (Art Gallery of New South Wales)

by
ABR Arts 26 July 2018

John Russell: Australia’s French Impressionist (Art Gallery of New South Wales)

by
ABR Arts 26 July 2018

John Russell (1858–1930) is an artist who has largely fallen through the cracks of art history. Neither Australian enough to be incorporated into the history of Australian art, nor French enough to be recognised as a major player in histories of French art, Russell has been consistently overlooked – until now.

The major retrospective of his work curated by Wayne Tunnicliffe, currently on display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, makes the case for the insertion of Russell into the grand narrative of modern art by situating him alongside some of the most iconic Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Symbolist artists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries: Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh, Auguste Rodin, Henri Matisse, and others. The exhibition places the Sydney-born, London-trained artist, who spent the majority of his career working in Paris and on the island of Belle-Île, at the centre of French avant-gardism. Remarkably, in such august company, Russell holds his own.

The exhibition includes examples of the artist’s figure studies produced under the direction of Alphonse Legros at the Slade Art School; realist, impressionist, and post-impressionist experiments inspired by his time in the Parisian atelier of Fernand Cormon; landscape paintings of the Belle-Île coastline and seascapes of the rough Atlantic ocean; and watercolours of scenes in France, Switzerland, Portofino, and Sydney.

From the New Issue

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.