Moses B. Russell: Yankee miniaturist

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2002 by Randall L. Holton, Charles A. Gilday

Although time has obscured his name, his art, and the renown of his sitters, Moses B. Russell was a highly celebrated and acclaimed portrait painter in his day. A native of North Woodstock in the wilds of New Hampshire's White Mountains, he went on to become one of Boston's leading miniaturists in the 1830s and 1840s. His small watercolor likenesses on ivory though usually signed, are sometimes confused with those of his wife, Clarissa Peters Russell, whose ethereal portraits of children were the subject of an article in this magazine in December 1999. (1) Moses Russell captured a fascinating range of subjects with exceptional clarity, luminosity, and color, and demonstrated a surprising ability to execute both folk and academic portraits. His most successful images, exquisite and gemlike, are a striking visual legacy from a vanished world and ensure his place in the annals of Boston's rich artistic history.

While little is known about his early years in New Hampshire, the stone obelisk that marks his grave in North Woodstock (2) reveals that Moses Baker Russell was born on April 5, 1809, and that he was the son of Peletiah Russell (d. 1809) and the grandson of Peter Russell (1732-1814), thereby establishing his descent from a family originally from Andover; Massachusetts. (3) Peter served in the American Revolution, and Peletiah appears in the Peeling (now Woodstock) town records as a surveyor of highways in 1809, the year he drowned in the Pemigewasset River--a tragedy recounted almost seventy-five years later in Moses Russell's obituary in a New Hampshire newspaper in 1884. (4) The identity of his mother (5) and his maternal ancestry, however, remain a mystery and the extent of his schooling and artistic training, if any, is also unknown.

Russell was in Boston by 1829, the date on his earliest known work, (6) a delicate oval likeness of Edward Gordon Odiorne (Pl. X), the firstborn son of a successful iron and nail merchant. (7) Thus he was in Boston at the age of twenty, several years before he is first listed in the city directory in 1833. Despite the shortcomings of an inexperienced hand--tentative drawing; lack of modeling in the face and body, and limited Palette--the portrait exhibits a ready, primitive charm. The large, expressive, heavily outlined eyes capture the essential innocence of the infant, who was no more than five months old at the time he was painted. Fortunately, Russell's predilection for signing his miniatures started early because the blue-brown stippled background in this initial attempt is completely atypical of his style and technique and gives no hint of the sophistication and coloring that characterize many of his later works.

An advertisement in the Boston Daily Evening Transcript in 1834 documents that in his early years Moses Russell shared a studio at 46 Washington Street with one S. Russell, a long forgotten portrait and miniature painter who was possibly his brother (3) The Boston directory of the same year reveals that the initial "S" stands for Sumner, whose death from consumption in New Hampton, New Hampshire, on June l4 1835, at the age of twenty-seven was widely reported in the Boston newspapers. (9) Nothing is known of Sumner Russell's life beyond the hare facts that he attended the New Hampton Academical and Theological Institution from 1829 to 1831 as a student in the "Senior English Department" and was listed in that school's annual catalogues as being from New Hampton. (10)

Quite miraculously, a miniature of Sumner Russell by Moses Russell survives (P1. V). Painted about 1832, it casts Sumner in the romantic pose of an aspiring artist, palette and maulstick at hand, his distant gaze both engaging and poetic as he looks toward unseen worlds. His face, almost in profile, shows a high coloring that is close to feverish and no doubt reflects his consumptive state. Although the handling is still primitive, the drawing is more self-assured than in the 1829 portrait, and, even more significantly, Russell has started to let the light in, thereby achieving a brightness in the face that gives the subject a more solid presence within his rectangular space. The background is still quite dark, but the purple hue that would later become the signature color in Russell's backgrounds can be seen here in two of the paint daubs on the palette and is also faintly visible in the shadow of the dark ringlets falling over the subject's forehead. Sumner Russell is remembered as he wanted to be remembere d, and, as this miniature eloquently demonstrates, the slimmest of lives can be hallowed by the painter's brush.

As Moses Russell became more established in the Boston artistic community and more confident in his abilities, he actively contributed to the various art exhibitions in the city His miniatures were displayed at the Boston Athenaeum (1834-1836 and 1838-1846), the American Gallery of the Fine Arts (1835), and the Boston Artists' Association (1842- 1844), of which he was an original member along with Washington Allston (1779-1843) and Chester Harding (1792-1866). (11) The triennial fairs of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association in Boston attracted citywide celebration and fanfare, and Russell entered miniatures in 1841, 1844, and 1847. As he gained considerable publicity from these exhibitions, Russell also found favor with newspaper editors, particularly those at the Daily Evening Transcript, who regularly lauded his latest portrait in their pages. A letter to the editor of that newspaper in 1838 included this extravagant praise: