John Russell (English painter)
John Russell RA (29 March 1745 – 20 April 1806) was an English painter renowned for his portrait work in oils and pastels, and as a writer and teacher of painting techniques.
[3] He was introduced to Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, who unsuccessfully attempted to persuade him to give up painting and attend her Methodist ministers' training college at Trevecca in Wales.
In 1770, Russell painted Methodist minister, George Whitefield (engraved by James Watson) and the future philanthropist, William Wilberforce, then only eleven years old.
[4] In 1771, he exhibited a portrait in oils of Charles Wesley at the Royal Academy and, in 1772, painted Selina, Countess of Huntingdon in pastel.
[2] In 1788, after a long wait, Russell was elected a royal academician, in the same year painting a portrait of the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks.
The results obviously pleased the monarch as, in 1790, he was appointed Crayon (pastel) Painter to King George III, Queen Charlotte, the Prince of Wales (both of whom Russell also painted) and the Duke of York.
Russell was interested in astronomy and made, with the assistance of his daughter, a lunar map, which he engraved on two plates which formed a globe showing the visible surface of the Moon – it took twenty years to finish.
[2] Russell's large and highly detailed pastel drawing of The Face of the Moon (1793–1797) is "the most faithful early representation of the lunar sphere".
Some of his best portraits were of the era's acclaimed scientists, such as his friend William Herschel, who he depicted holding a stellar chart showing his discovery of Uranus.
"He showed the moon at seventeen or eighteen days, but in doing so added an oblique – and impossible – source of illumination. Under the resulting raking light all the variations of the moon's surface are thrown into greater relief." [ 6 ]