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Ad Code: 4
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from Auction House Records.
naval battle between the Shannon and Chesapeake
Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Edward John Russell was a painter, printmaker, draftsman, illustrator, political cartoonist and photographer. He was born on the Isle of Wight, England, and lived his adult years in the Canadian province of New Brunswick, and in Boston, Massachusetts where he died. (1)
His mediums were oil, watercolor, gouache*, pen and ink, graphite*, wood engraving* and lithography*. His most well known subjects are ships, specifically portraits of single boats under sail. However his oeuvre also included other marine themes like ship wrecks, boat races, harbors and navy activity; as well as non-marine subjects such as cityscapes, street scenes, genre*, war, natural disasters, news events, politics and portraits. His style was Realism*. (2)
According to the Canadian Heritage Information Network* there are Edward John Russell works in the permanent collections of the Art Gallery of Hamilton (Ontario), Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (Halifax), Beaverbrook Art Gallery (Fredericton, New Brunswick), Canadian War Museum (Ottawa), McCord Museum of Canadian History (Montreal), and the New Brunswick Museum (Saint John).
His work is discussed in “Painting in Canada: a history” (1966), by J. Russell Harper; “Early Painters and Engravers in Canada” (1970), by J. Russell Harper; “A Dictionary of Canadian Artists" (1974), by Colin S. MacDonald; “Art and Architecture in Canada” (1991), by Loren R. Lerner and Mary F. Williamson; "The Collector's Dictionary of Canadian Artists at Auction" (2001), by Anthony R. Westbridge and Diana L. Bodnar; and “Biographical Index of Artists in Canada” (2003), by Evelyn de Rostaing McMann.
Below are biographies written by Carol Kuehner – columnist for the Telegraph-Journal (Saint John) and the New Brunswick Reader – which appears in New Brunswick.net; and by Robert S. Elliot – Historian of Technology and head, Humanities Division, New Brunswick Museum – which appears in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online.
Biography from New Brunswick.Net.
“Master of Marine Painting” – Edward John Russell is known for the accuracy of his painting of ships and his depictions of 19th-century New Brunswick life.
Recording the heyday of New Brunswick history - the era of the sailing ship - probably wasn't Edward John Russell's priority when he sat on the end of a pier in Saint John sketching a ship. More likely he was trying to support his wife and six children. Yet today his marine paintings are considered one of the best records of New Brunswick's ships.
Born into a comfortable family on the Isle of Wight in the English Channel in 1832, Russell showed interest in art at a young age. No doubt his mother and her family helped fan that interest, Russell's mother being the daughter of John Wiltshire of Soho, a businessman and art critic who frequently entertained British portraitist Sir Thomas Lawrence [see AskART] in his home.
But Russell's mother died when he was seven, and his father remarried. Insisting Russell pursue a business career rather than an artistic one, his father sent him to a boarding school near London. Later Russell was apprenticed to a dry goods firm in London, and became a junior clerk for a glove manufacturer.
Meanwhile Irish-born John Boyd, later to become Senator Boyd and Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick, had established The London House, New Brunswick's largest retail shop, on Market Square in Saint John. While doing business in London in 1851, Boyd met young Russell and offered him a job in New Brunswick. So it was that 19-year-old Russell arrived in Saint John and went to work within sight of the harbour just as the era of New Brunswick's sailing ships was budding.
For years Russell pursued his interest in art while eking out a living as a bookkeeper. In May, 1857, four sketches by Russell, Breaking Up of the Ice in the Saint John River, Fredericton, were published in The Illustrated London News. One showed ice piled up beside the Beckwith & Marsh lumber mill, where Russell kept books for John L. Marsh, one of the partners in the business.
More sketches by Russell appeared in the years that followed, and in 1860 The London Illustrated News assigned him to cover part of the visit of Edward, Prince of Wales, to New Brunswick.
In 1861 Russell illustrated and authored a book of sketches of New Brunswick, "beautifully illuminated with tinted lithographs," intended to encourage emigration from England to Canada.
Russell's boss, John L. Marsh, was a wealthy man, the owner of a large farm as well as a lumber merchant. His wife was descended from French aristocracy. He wasn't pleased in 1862 when his daughter, Julia Louise LeBrun Marsh, became enamoured with his penniless bookkeeper. Nevertheless, Julia and Russell married. They immediately moved to Saint John and built a small house - apparently using Russell's design and Julia's money - on Queen Street in West Saint John.
Russell may have kept books for a number of businesses, but he seemed perpetually unable to balance his own. He lacked neither good ideas nor ambition, but seems to have plunged into various ventures, including a photography studio, without foresight or means, to complete them. He was repeatedly forced to mortgage his home. More than once Julia's brother, who was Chief Magistrate of Fredericton for 40 years, saved him from foreclosure.
Russell did illustrations not only for The London Illustrated News, but also for The Canadian Illustrated News and the Saint John Daily Telegraph. Around 1870 he began concentrating on marine paintings, receiving $10 for a ship's likeness during good times, as little as $4 during bad times. Because his buyers were often ships' owners or captains who cared more about accuracy than art, some of Russell's marine paintings are of little artistic value, but they form an extensive and accurate record of New Brunswick ships.
Russell often painted background and ship on separate occasions. He painted some ships while they were still under construction, painting sails from the sail maker’s plans. He became known for making the ship's name clearly visible, and for Partridge Island in the background. Sometimes Russell sketched while sitting on a pier, feet dangling. Taking his sketches home, he made watercolours from them, removing surplus paint from his brush with his mouth. To bring out the colours, he'd turn a finished painting over, sponge the back, and press it with a hot iron.
After Julia's death, Russell moved to Boston. There he married Marie Lewis, and spent about seven years working on a book. T he book was in production when a printing shop fire destroyed it.
After returning to Saint John in 1890, Russell did reproductions and newspaper illustrations. In 1895 an inheritance from his father's estate finally relieved him from financial pressures, enabling his art to attain a high level. Eventually Russell returned to Boston, where he was working on an illustrated book when his death at age 74 left that project, like so many others, unfinished.
Today Russell is best known for his marine paintings and the information they contain, but curator [New Brunswick Museum 1957 – 1964] Huia Ryder has called many of his illustrations done for periodicals not only "unquestionably good," but "the most accurate portrayal in existence of New Brunswick life during the last half of the nineteenth century." Toward the end of his life Russell conceded more than once that his father had been right, that he should have pursued a career in business rather than art. If he had, we'd be the poorer for it in our understanding of our past.
By Carol Kuehner
Biography from Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online
Edward John Russell, ship portrait painter, newspaper illustrator, and photographer; b. May 1832 on the Isle of Wight, England; m. first 4 Aug. 1863 Julia Louise LeBrun Marsh in Fredericton, and they had five sons and one daughter; m. secondly 1883, in Boston, Marie Lewis of Saint John, N.B., and they had a son and a daughter who survived to adulthood; d. 1 Sept. 1906 in Boston.
In 1851, at the age of 19, Edward John Russell arrived in Saint John [New Brunswick] on the barque Faside, carrying a rather crude painting of the vessel that he had produced during the voyage from England. Like thousands of other immigrants to British North America during the mid 19th century, he found a port alive with shipping and commerce as New Brunswick participated in the great age of sail. The numerous ship portraits he was to paint after 1870 document this maritime activity. Although in retrospect the surviving portrait of the Faside might seem to symbolize the commencement of an artistic career, in fact Russell initially pursued other employment.
According to family tradition, Russell was born into reasonably comfortable circumstances on the Isle of Wight and became a boarder at Peckham Collegiate School in Southwark (London). In London he bowed to his father’s wishes and embarked upon a career in business, despite his own preference for art. By 1851 he had become a junior clerk for a firm of glove manufacturers in Cheapside.
In Saint John, Russell clerked for the dry-goods firm of John Boyd* and Thomas Wilder Daniel*. However, about 1857 he relocated in Fredericton [New Brunswick], where he laboured as a bookkeeper in the lumber business of John Lothrop Marsh, the father of his future wife. It was in Fredericton that Russell began his artistic career. Between 1857 and 1862 he contributed sketches to the Illustrated London News, including several in 1860 when he covered the Saint John–Fredericton leg of the Prince of Wales’s world tour. In 1861 he completed his most ambitious work to date, a book titled Illustrated sketches of New Brunswick, published by John McMillan of Saint John.
Back in Saint John in 1862, Russell opened a studio on Market Square as an “Artist and Landscape Photographer”; two years later his Imperial Photograph Gallery started up on Germain Street. Russell’s first recorded venture as a publisher was launched from the latter location, a lithographic print of the “Provincial Exhibition Palace. Fredericton, New Brunswick, 1864.”
Russell painted several ship portraits before 1870, but his output increased substantially after that date. Like ship portrait painters elsewhere, he sold his water-colours of merchant vessels and river-boats to individuals who had an intimate connection with the vessels pictured. He also sought income from other sources, and between 1871 and 1875 he submitted over 90 illustrations to the Canadian Illustrated News (Montreal). Despite his involvement in a variety of commercial ventures, he was apparently not successful as a businessman and was often short of money. Released in 1878, his Conservative political magazine Cartoon, a weekly, survived for only four issues.
About three years after the death of his first wife in 1880, Russell moved to Boston, where he remarried and remained for seven years. After his return to Saint John he continued to produce ship portraits, and began to execute water-colours of Saint John Harbour as well. From late 1893 to 1895 he completed more than 100 illustrations for a local newspaper, the Daily Telegraph. He then went back to Massachusetts and lived there until his death.
Surviving examples of his work show that Russell was both a competent photographer and a prolific newspaper illustrator, but today he is remembered for his many water-colour paintings of merchant sailing vessels and river steamboats. These surprisingly accurate depictions serve as an enduring visual record of New Brunswick’s maritime past and of the heyday of its sailing vessels which have long since disappeared.
Notes:
In addition to his Illustrated sketches of New Brunswick, Russell published Memorial marine museum and picture gallery for the city and county of Yarmouth: a proposition, Acadiensis (Saint John, N.B.), 3 (1903): 304–7. A collection of his ship portraits is held in the Dept. of Fine and Decorative Arts of the N.B. Museum.
Relevant newspapers, beyond those mentioned in the text, are the Gleaner (Chatham, N.B.), 11 Sept. 1858, 2 July 1859; the New Brunswick Reporter and Fredericton Advertiser, 6 Nov., 4 Dec. 1857; and the following Saint John papers: the Daily Telegraph and its predecessors, 1864–95; the Morning News, 3 May 1861, 11 Aug. 1862; the New Brunswick Courier, 8 Aug. 1863; and the Sun, 4 Sept. 1906.
Huia G. Ryder’s pamphlet, Edward John Russell: marine artist ([Saint John], 1953), published by the N.B. Museum, reproduces a photograph of Russell. Ryder’s correspondence and research notes on Russell, 1951–53, are now held by Dorothy Dearborn of Hampton, N.B.
By Robert S. Elliot
© 2000 University of Toronto/Université Laval
Footnotes:
(1) According to Early Painters and Engravers in Canada (1970), by J. Russell Harper, the details of Russell’s places of residence are as follows: St. John 1851 – 1857, 1862 – 1882 , 1890 – 1895; Fredericton 1857 – c.1862; Boston 1882 – 1889, 1895 – death.
(2) Sources: AskART Images; and museum illustrations and descriptions of mediums in the Canadian Heritage Information Network* data base.
* For more in-depth information about these terms and others, see AskART.com. Glossary http://www.askart.com/AskART/lists/Art_Definition.aspx.
Prepared and contributed by M.D.Silverbrooke.
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Biography from VALLEJO GALLERY, LLC, Marine Art Specialists:
| Born on the Isle of Wight, Russell migrated to New Brunswick in 1852 where he made sketches for the Illustrated London News. In 1870 he began specializing in marines and ship portraiture, creating several travel booklets for the International Steamship Co. and the Providence and Baltimore steamship lines.
In 1895 he moved to Boston where he worked as an illustrator and ship's portraitist in watercolor. He also became well known as a political cartoonist. In his later years he specialized in creating watercolors of historic naval battles of fine quality. Of the six examples in the Peabody Museum, all are dated in the early 20th century. |
| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
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