Australia’s Impressionists at the National Gallery, London

Australian Impressionist John Russell swam, boxed, wrestled a phosphorescent 7ft conger eel by moonlight, speared a giant tuna and, across the treacherous waters around his Brittany home, ferried nervous passengers including Auguste Rodin, who called him a Triton. Russell painted blustery, expressive seascapes with corresponding force, positioning himself on a cliff edge with canvases roped to the ground before his favourite motif, the outcrop of jagged “needles” known as Les Aiguilles de Port Coton, off the island of Belle Île.

“Aiguille de Coton, Belle-Île”, “Rough Sea, Belle Île” and “Rough Sea, Morestil” are near-abstract, tangled zigzags of warm pink, violet and indigo, rising from waves dabbed brilliant white, while rough swells reverberate in the chill dark shadows of the rocks. Visiting from collections in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney, these hot-cold stunners are fresh to European audiences, and are highlights of London’s first, small exhibition devoted to Australia’s Impressionists, just opened at the National Gallery.

This is anything but a purely local show. Russell, born in Sydney in 1858, came to see the world through the prism of the most advanced European art. Alternating passages of chromatic harmony and dissonance in “Coucher de Soleil sur Morestil” are as contested and tumultuous as those of his friend Van Gogh. Short, punchy strokes, longer swirls and lashes of palette knife suggest choppy seas crashing against the coast, then Russell scratches into the surface with the hard end of the brush to evoke solid, almost sculptural cliffs.

“The noise is diabolical and extraordinary. There was near me a whirlwind of foam, like big snowflakes, that rose up a good 80ft. But the poor painter is no match,” Russell told Rodin. A red-bearded and generous giant with a booming voice, Russell to Frenchmen embodied the idea of the rugged outdoor-living Antipodean battling nature, and French painters flocked to Belle Île, which became an artists’ colony in the 1890s-1900s.

The first outsider to settle there, Russell built his clifftop home after a chance encounter on the island in 1886 with Monet, who, at a moment of personal crisis, had come to the wildest, remotest place he could find to paint alone. “It’s all caves, headlands, extraordinary needles piled one on top of another . . . sinister, diabolical, magnificent . . . blue schists threaded with gold,” Monet noted. Russell won him over by addressing him as “the prince of Impressionists” and finding him a porter, a lobster fisherman who carried Monet’s equipment up and down the steepest paths through dreadful weather for two francs a day.

In return, Russell was allowed to watch Monet work on his “Aiguille” paintings under glittery sunlight or storm clouds. The lesson made Russell an Impressionist and colourist. The following year he experimented with loose, multidirectional brushstrokes and high contrasts of grassy verges versus white limestone cliffs in “Madame Sisley on the Banks of the Loing at Moret”, which opens his oeuvre here.

Gifted, impassioned follower rather than pioneer, Russell is an unlikely link in art history. In 1896 Matisse, then studying with symbolist Gustave Moreau and still restricting himself to earthy browns and clay greens, visited Belle Île and discovered Russell painting his own flamboyant “Aiguille” canvases. For three summers Matisse was Russell’s Monet-obsessed pupil. After 1900 the teacher rushed to keep pace with his student’s rainbow palette. Russell’s sailboats against a mass of cliffs not yet fully illuminated by the rising sun in “Cruach en Mahr, Matin, Belle-Île-en-Mer”, constructed from complex layers of contrasting colour veiled in a dominant key of electric blue, was displayed in the 1905 “Fauve” Salon d’Automne alongside Matisse and Derain, and holds up against the younger artists’ daring.

“Your works will live, I am certain. One day you will be placed on the same level with our friends Monet, Renoir, and Van Gogh,” Rodin told Russell. But Russell’s work never became widely known: when his wife died in 1908, he destroyed almost all of it, lived peripatetically for a decade, then returned to Australia to die in obscurity. The surviving works shown here are revelatory.

Russell, presumably considered a French painter, was excluded from the Royal Academy’s 2013 Australia exhibition; the National Gallery brings him into the Australian story, underlining his connections to foundational Australian Impressionist Tom Roberts. Both studied in London, travelled together through France in 1883, corresponded extensively. Roberts in turn influenced the slightly younger Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder. This trio are united here to tell a more familiar story: of second generation Impressionism co-opted to express burgeoning national identity.

The major sunny, confident landscapes here came to the RA in 2013; now they cheer a London winter’s day. In the lunging stockman seen through a flurry of dust trying to control a stampede of bolting sheep in “A Break Away!”, Roberts portrays “a life different from any other country in the world”. His “Allegro con Brio: Bourke Street West” shows wealthy, dynamic Melbourne, among the world’s richest late 19th-century cities, at midday. Choice details — crouching bootblack, sunbathing dog, ice cart — stand out even as crowds and lines of cabs evaporate in glaring light.

Condor’s “Departure of the Orient — Circular Quay”, depicting Sydney’s bustling port, and “A Holiday at Mentone”, painted at the Melbourne beach resort and including flecks of sand, are more delicate and decorative, with silvery fugitive effects reminiscent of Whistler: an avant-garde manner celebrating young places in a young country.

With a more muscular style, Streeton too conveys “the loveliness of the new landscape with heat and drought and flies”. Dry brushwork underscores parched conditions in “Golden Summer, Eaglemont”, the thrill of hot air, blistering rock, man against the elements in “Fire’s On!” overwhelms this narrative of a miner’s death during the blasting of a tunnel. Above all, Streeton anchors colonial interventions into landscape as timeless: “Still glides the stream and shall forever glide” and “The purple noon’s transparent might”, titled from Wordsworth and Shelley, are serene, panoramic vistas of river plains cleared as pasture just 50 years earlier.

This exhibition was developed in response to the long-term loan, beginning last year, of Streeton”s “Blue Pacific”, the first Australian picture to enter the National Gallery. Streeton adds a voice to Trafalgar Square’s increasingly global fin de siècle holdings — Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s “Lake Keitele”, George Bellows’ “Men of the Docks”, Peder Balke’s “The Tempest” are recent acquisitions — as the museum seeks to recalibrate its account of the beginnings of modern art. As a story of connections and identities, this show is a pertinent, unexpected contribution.

To March 26, nationalgallery.org.uk

Photographs: Acorn Photo Perth Kerry Stokes Collection; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and the National Library of Australia, Canberra; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

Letter in response to this article:

Russell could be thought of as a European artist / From Richard Tomkins