Vincent van Gogh (Russell painting) Vincent van Gogh" (1887) and Paul Gauguin's "The Painter of Sunflowers" (1888). Van Gogh seems to have been particularly attached to Russell's portrait, which the Australian gifted to him as a mark of their friendship. The painting passed from Van Gogh to his brother Theo, then to their family, and is now in the permanent collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Russell was born into a wealthy engineering family in 1858 in Sydney, New South Wales. The family business, P.N. Russell & Co, was responsible for much of the city's 19th-century ironwork. Although Russell had a strong interest
Early works of Vincent van Gogh personal spirituality that was comforting and important to him. By 1879, he made a shift in the direction of his life and found he could express his "love of God and man" through painting. In 1880 Van Gogh writes of his desire to be useful as an artist, "To try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God; one man wrote or told it in a book; another, in a picture." After having moved to Brussels Van Gogh decided to study on his own, rather than