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拍品專文
La Mer a La Spezia forms part of the important series of paintings painted during Russell's second visit to Antibes in 1895-96. The series seems to have possibly been painted in emulation of Monet's Antibes studies depicting the Bay of Nice. This work painted with force and directness relies for its impact on the brilliance of pure colour. The forms are uncomplicated and of minimal importance within the picture structure, working as controlling edges and boundaries for the free flow of the colour
Bold, high-keyed colours in recognisable naturalistic shapes are the most striking characteristics of John Peter Russell's art, and yet the artistic maxims of form and colour cannot really be separated in his work. For Russell, an involvement with colour became, with rustic subject-matter, one of the twin spearheads of his thrust towards primitivism - towards what he came to consider essential in art.
Russell's interest in colour paralleled with his interest of Impressionist technique. Neither were pressed beyond a pictorial naturalism and unlike his contemporaries Monet, Gauguin and Van Gogh, Russell's interest in colour did not lead to further perceptual subtleties or to deeper conceptual resonances. In the years after Paris, on Belle-Ile and at Antibes, Russell's artistic problem remained constant, and fundamentally that of Impressionism ofthe 1870s: how to capture in the purest and brightest hues, the flux and play of the motif in nature.
In this work we see Russell is primarily interested in blocking out in a small area, harmonious colour contrasts of the greatest chromatic intensity. Areas are structured in simplified approximations to naturalistic shapes and the whole is bathed in a bright, hard light.
La Mer a La Spezia points the way to what was to be Russell's overriding pictorial convern in the last years of his life: how to capture as quickly as possible the brilliance of colour in nature, couched in the simplest possible forms.
Bold, high-keyed colours in recognisable naturalistic shapes are the most striking characteristics of John Peter Russell's art, and yet the artistic maxims of form and colour cannot really be separated in his work. For Russell, an involvement with colour became, with rustic subject-matter, one of the twin spearheads of his thrust towards primitivism - towards what he came to consider essential in art.
Russell's interest in colour paralleled with his interest of Impressionist technique. Neither were pressed beyond a pictorial naturalism and unlike his contemporaries Monet, Gauguin and Van Gogh, Russell's interest in colour did not lead to further perceptual subtleties or to deeper conceptual resonances. In the years after Paris, on Belle-Ile and at Antibes, Russell's artistic problem remained constant, and fundamentally that of Impressionism ofthe 1870s: how to capture in the purest and brightest hues, the flux and play of the motif in nature.
In this work we see Russell is primarily interested in blocking out in a small area, harmonious colour contrasts of the greatest chromatic intensity. Areas are structured in simplified approximations to naturalistic shapes and the whole is bathed in a bright, hard light.
La Mer a La Spezia points the way to what was to be Russell's overriding pictorial convern in the last years of his life: how to capture as quickly as possible the brilliance of colour in nature, couched in the simplest possible forms.