Alex Russell Flint’s interiors education

Alex Russell Flint’s paintings have a storybook quality. Precisely observed bucolic scenes in realist style, they are often undercut by hints of tension. It’s fitting, then, that his home in the rolling hills of the Poitou-Charentes region of France, an imposing 19th-century schoolhouse that served the once-thriving village of Argenton-Château, could have jumped straight from the pages of a children’s picture book. 

Russell Flint, who is the great-grandson of the watercolourist William Russell Flint, purchased the rundown building in 2010 from fellow painter Pierre de Chevilly, who lived nearby with his partner, the French Nouvelle Vague actress Bernadette Lafont. Set into the hillside overlooking the river Argenton, the main building dates from 1850, with the second wing added in 1905. De Chevilly had used L’Ancienne École as a studio, and had smashed down a few walls before deciding to downsize and sell. When Russell Flint got the keys, having spied it years earlier on a walk, there were no bathrooms or kitchen and all the ceilings had collapsed. Extension cables sprouted from the one electric plug that worked. Outside, grey tarmac covered the garden and blueish concrete buttressing obscured the view beyond the original stone walls. 

The artist moved in with an architect’s plan chest (he discovered the battered map of nearby Angers, which now hangs in the hallway, inside it) and not much else. “I didn’t quite realise how big it was,” he says of the 6,500sq ft property set on roughly an acre of land. “And I had no idea how to do anything other than break stuff.” Over 14 years, he has tackled much of the renovation himself, occasionally with the help of friends, stripping floors to expose original oak boards, and removing stud walls and false ceilings to open up rooms to their original commodious classroom proportions. He has taken pains to reinstate original details, such as the chequerboard painted floors in the préau, or the covered playground, which opens onto the terrace – now smothered with climbing roses and wisteria – beneath the house. “It’s the first house I’ve ever owned, and I liked the idea of having a place where there is always a project,” he says with understatement.  

On a drizzly May day Russell Flint, a boyish 49, leads a tour of the house. En route, he diffidently refers to his haphazard decorating philosophy as “cabane-ing”. “It feels like making a den as a kid,” he says. “You use whatever you can find.” The furniture has been cobbled together from local brocantes, Emmaus charity shops, eBay and friends and family, comprising a cosy “Tetris” of well-loved items. On the ground floor, a country kitchen presided over by Jean the tabby cat occupies what was formerly a canteen, while a panelled classroom has been painted green-blue and reconfigured as a salon. The former directrice’s quarters is now one of two guest apartments, occasionally rented out and, as of August 2025, offered to students of a series of painting workshops.

A nostalgic mood prevails – remnants of the past are evident at every turn. The walls of one bathroom are covered in pages from 1938-1940s editions of Paris Match, unearthed at a local vide-grenier. Up an elegant oak staircase is a petite emerald-walled winter bedroom (easier to heat) and a larger summer bedroom with a fireplace lined with Delft tiles requisitioned from Russell Flint’s parents’ home in Walmer, Kent. His vast studio, where he works in front of a crackling fire in the winter, is dominated by a “monster” easel made by Winsor & Newton in 1905 and shaped like a guillotine. Familiar paintings and prints by his great-grandfather, mainly depicting classical scenes, decorate the walls. “I always loved and admired them,” he says as we pause to admire the artworks, “but I was aware that some art critics were sniffy about his later work, dismissing them as ‘breastscapes’ that for all their technical brilliance lacked substance.”   

Perhaps such sniping explains Russell Flint junior’s reticence to discuss his own work. “I’m much more comfortable talking about the house,” he admits. Many rooms are recognisable backdrops to his paintings. The en suite bathroom inspired several portraits after Russell Flint ripped off the wallpaper and discovered its vivid arsenic-hued walls, repairing them by hand. The staircase leading to the upper attic levels, which remained untouched for many years, prompted a particularly foreboding series. The Tobogganist depicts a young girl poised on the top step, seemingly about to launch herself down on a wooden sled, while The Landing depicts a figure crumpled by the bottom step next to a solitary rollerskate. 

L’Ancienne École features less frequently in newer works. “I don’t want to be confined,” Russell Flint shrugs. Although he concedes, “the house can’t be separated from my paintings.” He adds: “I feel creatively just as much rewarded by decorating this place.” He intersperses bouts at his easel – where he works with Michael Harding oil paints on linen panels he makes up himself – with dull tasks such as tinting a yellowing (non-original) floor with walnut stain. Stylistic decisions are instinctive. “There’s a sort of cosiness. When I bought this place, I wanted to create that feeling,” he recalls. “I had no idea exactly how to do it, but I was trying to create a sense of balance and composition with a pleasing sense of colour.” 

In the morning room, a lunch of barbecued chicken and roasted miso-dressed broccoli is laid out with a bottle of locally produced Cabernet Franc rosé. If he is an attentive host, such domesticity would have seemed anathema to a younger Russell Flint. Raised in Canterbury by a police-officer father and nurse mother, he was determined to study realist painting, inspired in part by his great-grandfather’s work. Following his schooling, he flitted between the UK, France and Italy, first studying at a British illustration school and then in Florence. After coming across a postcard in a Canterbury art store advertising courses at L’École Albert Defois, run by the American painter Ted Seth Jacobs in the Loire Valley, he enrolled. Though the “hideous” building in “a nondescript village” didn’t quite live up to his expectations, he “learnt some valuable stuff” from Jacobs. It also placed him near the schoolhouse, about 12 miles away. “Back then, I would have been horrified if you had told me I would end up settling here,” he laughs. 

The house became a family home in 2020, when Russell Flint’s French girlfriend Sandrine Schumacher, founder of production agency Hexagone, moved in with her two teenage sons from her first marriage, César and Armand. The move precipitated the renovation a year later of the untouched 1905-era attic, which was divided into bedrooms for the boys. Schumacher travels regularly to Paris, but has embraced the quieter pace of the campagne. “It gives you more space to breathe and think,” she says. The couple married at the house in September 2023, hosting their wedding dinner for 80 friends and family in the préau, which they decorated with locally foraged wildflowers. 

In June 2025, Russell Flint will present new work in a solo show at New York’s Arcadia Contemporary gallery, expanding on his favoured theme of “an implied narrative that is open to interpretation”. He takes inspiration from films, books and even his childhood toys: a neon orange and turquoise plastic Fisher-Price aeroplane inspired the colour palette in a recent portrait. Then there’s the endless to-do list of house jobs. Converting the attic in the 1850s-era wing into bedrooms is a long-term plan. The couple also intends to create a stone staircase leading from the terrace to the plot of land below, currently carpeted with poppies, and install a swimming pool. “Even if the house keeps us busy, it’s been nurturing,” says Schumacher. Russell Flint nods. “Nothing is quite as it should be, but it’s comfortable enough.”