Painted in a realist and academic manner, the portrait shows hints of the impressionist techniques that Russell and Van Gogh began experimenting with in the latter half of the 1880s.

[3] He went to London in 1881 and enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, attending classes sporadically over several months, then returned to Sydney in 1882 before touring Europe the following year with fellow Australian artist Tom Roberts.

[5] As such, they shared an allegiance to an older generation of artists, especially the French painter of peasant farmers, Jean-François Millet, and had a common belief in "the individual and his powers of expression, and an instinctive detachment from the life of the metropolis".

[4] Regarded by Parisians as an archetypal "wild Australian", Russell had an "independence of spirit" that, Joanna Mendelssohn speculates, helped shape his and Van Gogh's friendship.

[6] Russell's use of browns, reds and flesh tones are in keeping with the traditional académie palette, but the way in which the light falls across the sitter's face and hand, while completely missing the shoulder, transforms it into an unusually strong aesthetic element.

[2] According to Ann Gallaby and Robyn Sloggett, "This kind of illumination, combined with the deliberate effect of rapid brushwork as in an ébauche, suggests that the portrait is to be seen as a study in creative intensity – on the part of artist as well as sitter.

[9] Scottish artist Archibald Standish Hartrick, who first met Van Gogh at Russell's studio, remarked that the painting was not so dark originally, and remembered it depicting the Dutchman in a striped blue suit.

[8] The inscription above Van Gogh's head, originally in red but now barely visible, include the words pictor (Latin for “painter”) and amitié (French for “friendship”).

[11] In his 1939 autobiography, Hartrick called the portrait "an admirable likeness, more so than any of those by [Van Gogh] or Gauguin",[12] and said it captured one of the Dutchman's quirks:[13] He had an extraordinary trick of pouring out sentences in a mixture of Dutch, English, and French, then glancing quickly at you over his shoulder and hissing through his teeth as he finished a series.