John Peter Russell
1858–1930 · Australia · Impressionism
The story
The best early portrait of Vincent van Gogh was painted by an Australian. In 1886, sharing a Paris studio, John Peter Russell painted Vincent in oils. Van Gogh thought it the truest likeness of himself, and it hangs today in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
Russell came from a wealthy Sydney engineering family, which meant he never needed to sell a picture. He settled on Belle-Ile, a rugged island off the coast of Brittany, where he painted the sea alongside Claude Monet, wrote long letters to Van Gogh, and took in a young Henri Matisse. Matisse later said it was Russell who taught him colour theory and set him on his way, and he called the Australian his teacher.
Because he almost never exhibited, the art world lost track of him, and he is often called the lost impressionist. When his wife Marianna, once a favourite model of the sculptor Rodin, died in 1907, Russell in his grief destroyed some 400 of his own oils and watercolours. Rodin, hearing of it, wrote to him that his works would live all the same.
