Deutscher and Hackett

John Russell’s inherited wealth afforded many freedoms, setting him on a unique path unlike that of any other Australian artist of the time and bringing him into direct contact with some of the masters of European Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. No longer expected to join the family business following the premature death of his father and now in possession of a substantial fortune, he sailed to England in 1880, enrolling at London’s Slade School the following year. Continuing his studies at Fernand Cormon’s atelier in Paris in the mid-1880s, he worked alongside Émile Bernard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and later, Vincent Van Gogh. The two artists established an enduring friendship which is documented in their personal correspondence.¹ Russell was also one of the few artists to paint Van Gogh and the 1886 portrait, now in the collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, was treasured by the Dutchman who asked his brother Theo to ‘take good care of my portrait… which means a lot to me.’²

Around 1884 Russell met Marianna Mattiocco, probably in the studio of his friend, the British artist Harry Bates. Born into a farming family at Cassino, Italy, in 1865, Marianna and two of her brothers had moved to Paris, initially working as roving street performers and later, as artists’ models. Widely regarded as a classical beauty, Marianna was probably the model for Bates’ bas-relief sculpture, Dido, Queen of Carthage, 1885 (National Museum of Wales, Cardiff).³ Russell’s first dated drawings of Marianna are from 1886 and as Russell scholar Ann Galbally has noted, their inscriptions, which refer to her as Marianna Antonietta Russell (or M.A.A.R.), indicate the strength and seriousness of their relationship at the time even though they didn’t marry until early 1888.⁴ In the lead up to their marriage, Russell commissioned Auguste Rodin to sculpt a portrait of Marianna which he requested to be cast in silver so that it would have ‘all the delicacy of [the master’s] touch.’⁵ This commission initiated a longstanding friendship between the two artists and the silver bust, now in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, was followed by a unique variation in bronze which is held by the National Gallery of Victoria.⁶

Soon after, Russell and Marianna went to Italy, visiting her family in Cassino and in spring of the following year, travelling to Sicily where they established a base in the hilltop town of Taormina. The influence of the encounter with Monet on Belle-Île was significant and, stimulated by the clarity of the Mediterranean light, almost immediately Russell began working in a new way, creating compositions made up of pure strokes of high-keyed colour and removing black from his palette altogether.⁸ The clean, bright colours of Peasant women at Monte Cassino, 1886 (National Gallery of Australia) reflect these changes in approach, but it is in later paintings made around the time of a second visit to Cassino in 1889, such as The terraces of Monte Cassino, c.1889 (private collection) and the current work, Meules de Blé à Monte Cassino, c.1889, which show increasingly bold colour choices. Monet’s brilliantly coloured paintings of Antibes, which Russell saw in Paris in 1888, also influenced his chromatic experimentation during these years, feeding into his development as a brilliant and often daring colourist. Writing to Tom Roberts, Russell’s excitement about the possibilities of colour (and specifically the subject-matter of Belle-Île) is palpable, ‘But when we get to color. The gorse & heather. Yellow & purple, orange boat sails, blue sea, red rocks, green sea. All a matter of feeling. Tis in the man with brush & paint pot or it is not.’⁹

 
Meules de Blé à Monte Cassino takes in a view of the distant mountains, purple and white beneath a band of blue sky, with green fields in the middle distance and in the foreground, a vernacular stone building and trio of dome-shaped haystacks that glow in dazzling shades of orange, yellow and red. Deep purple shadows contrast with the shimmering golden hues of the central haystack, suggesting late afternoon and adding emphasis to the labouring lone figure. Such subject matter reflects the prevailing influence of Barbizon School painter Jean-François Millet (1814 – 75), whose paintings celebrated the nobility of peasant workers and a growing recognition at the end of the nineteenth century that this way of life was disappearing. This romantic notion of rural life was popular among contemporary artists and in addition to featuring in their imagery, was reflected in the choice that some made to live outside of the city centres.¹⁰ With the aim of establishing ‘a studio of the south’, Van Gogh moved to Arles in the south of France in early 1888, where harvest scenes became a familiar part of his subject matter. Indeed, one of the twelve ink drawings that he gave to Russell in 1888 – and one which Russell later gave to Matisse when he visited Belle-Île¹¹ – describes a pair of haystacks similar to those depicted in Meules de Blé à Monte Cassino. Writing to Russell in the summer of 1888, Van Gogh said, ‘For ever so long I have been wanting to write to you – but then the work has so taken me up. We have harvest time here at present and I am always in the fields… Am working at a Sower. The great field all violet, the sky and sun very yellow.’¹²