Lot 69: JOHN PETER RUSSELL , Australian 1858-1930 STORMY SKY AND SEA, BELLE-ILE, OFF BRITTANY Oil on canvas

Signed lower left Oil on canvas

32 by 40.2cm

Nevill Keating Galleries, London, 1975
Private collection, Melbourne
Artarmon Galleries, Sydney (label on reverse), February 1985
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above

Painted circa 1890
Temptuous, colour-saturated Belle-Ile seascapes such as this rank as Russell's most important paintings; undoubtedly the point at which he came closest to the French Impressionism of Claude Monet.

Russell first met Monet in September 1886 when both artists were staying here at the remote island of Belle-Ile off the Brittany coast in north-west France. Monet assumed that the young Australian Russell was American but found him 'tres amiable', and the two worked together side by side for a time on the rocky Atlantic shore. It seems likely that seeing Monet's Belle-Ile series exhibited in Paris the following year was a factor in Russell's decision to settle on the island with his family in 1888. He would remain there for twenty years - the happiest, both professionally and personally, of his life.

Russell at first did not approve of Monet's revolutionary technique, with its deliberate lack of distinction between form and colour. But by the 1890s his own style increasingly came closer to Monet's. The present work, entitled Stormy Sky and Sea, Belle-Ile, off Brittany and epitomising all Russell's passion for the place, is clearly heir to paintings by Monet such as Tempest on the Coast of Belle-Ile. The excitement and vigour of the brushwork, the warm pinks in the sky and icy blues of the seaspray, are also seen in Russell's larger Rough Sea, 1900, in the collection of Dr Joseph Brown at the National Gallery of Victoria.