He studied architecture briefly at McGill University, then became an undistinguished cartoonist for some newspapers in Montreal, contributing Pierre et Pierrette to La Patrie.

Drawing on his experience sketching beautiful women in Paris, he began adorning covers and interiors for magazines like College Humor and Judge, and later Life and Ballyhoo with his vivacious flappers.

Within a couple of years, Russell Patterson the illustrator went from obscurity to celebrity, at a time when the leading graphic artists were as famous as movie stars.

As his career blossomed, his ubiquitous version of the modern Jazz Age woman graced the covers and interior pages of The Saturday Evening Post, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan, Redbook and Photoplay, among many other magazines.

Martha H. Kennedy cites Patterson's dependence on the "graphic power of elegant, outlined forms, linear patterns of clothing and trailing smoke to compose strongly decorative, eye-catching designs.

Text on the map described it as "A chart neither too literal nor too emotional, shewing the city New York replete with the wondrous Spectacles, Mysteries, and Pastimes of the natives...

Patterson had an on-screen part playing himself in,[7] and created lifelike dolls he called "Personettes" for, the film Artists and Models, which starred Jack Benny (four other cartoonists including Rube Goldberg also appeared).

The puppets, you see, have a production number of their own… It seemed to me to be the perfect spoof of the usual song-and-dance interlude, proving how unnecessary it really is and how easy to duplicate (in fact, improve upon) with dolls.

He collaborated with writers Carolyn Wells and Percy Shaw on several series for the American Weekly Hearst Sunday magazine, all featuring the character Flossy Frills.

Maurice Horn called Mamie an "elegantly drawn, exquisitely composed page", but with "thin" humor, "a flapper strip that had somehow wandered into the wrong decade."

His fame and reputation were such that his endorsements of Medaglia D'Oro coffee, Rheingold Beer, and Lord Calvert whiskey were trumpeted in magazine advertisements.

[17] Russell Patterson died in Atlantic City of heart failure on March 17, 1977, as the Delaware Art Museum was preparing the first significant retrospective of his work.

In 2006, Fantagraphics published Top Hats and Flappers: The Art of Russell Patterson, edited by Shane Glines and Alex Chun, with a foreword by Armando Mendez.